Forum Moderators: not2easy
The last one that did this was in Iran - and you can imagine how impressed they weren't by a DCMA notice. Now we have similar in Vietnam. They and their hosts have serenely ignored DCMAs, legal threats, and all the usual huffing and puffing, and have in fact added our new content to their site as fast as we put it up on ours.
Other than actually suing the company in a Vietnamese court (expensive, takes years, and will probably get nowhere, we have been advised) we seem to have run out of the usual options.
We are thinking of putting a highly negative review of their website on ours. We will stress their lack of ethics, dishonest behaviour, and total disregard of copyright. As we are a well-known site in our field (no 1 or 2 for our major keywords) any web search for the copyright thieves should also turn up, hopefully above their own site, our negative comments about them.
However, as I've always been impressed with the quality of discussion on this forum, I thought I'd run it past those here, and get some soundings.
highly negative review
What's the upside?
If they have US connections somebody might decide make you a target. Sometimes you can't even say nice things without getting sued. The fact that you've been cheated might not help.
We are thinking of putting a highly negative review of their website on ours. We will stress their lack of ethics, dishonest behaviour, and total disregard of copyright.
So you want to give them even more traffic? The best thing to do is just ignore them, and continue working your own site. However, you COULD just block all Vietnam IP's for a while.
Is there some way with ICCAN?
Anyway, they have just opened a clone of their site, running on a Denver-based server, and using Adsense. Fixing THAT little red wagon should be fairly straightforward.
They have little to lose, you have nothing to gain.
Take the advice above and get their site removed.
The 'threat' is losing control of our content. Bear in mind we are not talking of a sentence or a para or two. This is large sections of our website, produced at some expense, copied verbatim for someone else to profit from.
We had an earlier case where someone was lifting our content and publishing it on one of those magazine sites. Because the contributor and website owner shared the adsense revenue from visitors to those pages, this was easier to stop.
What was harder to stop was that dozens of people lifted the material from that magazine site and put it on their own websites in the belief that this was somehow public domain. In fact someone I asked to take down our content gave me a list of other websites using it as if this somehow proved his innocence.
Also I know Google has systems in place to prevent duplicate content showing in the serps, but I suspect it will give a lower ranking to a site with widely available content than to one which provides relevant but unique material on a topic.
You can (often) get Google to de-list the thieves, and in many cases you can get web sites removed quite easily - I do not know about Iran, but they have a criminal code like every other country, and the web host may be persuaded of your case. It's worth one email to find out.
But the threat is not as large as you seem to think, simply because most theft sites rank poorly in the serps - and many disappear on their own anyway.
Read the advice here and in other threads - but success is the best defence available to you.
But the threat is not as large as you seem to think, simply because most theft sites rank poorly in the serps - and many disappear on their own anyway.
biscuit, Quadrille has already made the response I would have made. Yes, if a site actually appears somewhere reasonable on Google, it can be a threat, but most of these scrapers never do. I have found "blogs" that copied key articles on my site verbatim, and decided not to do anything because no one would ever find that site before finding mine. Go after the infringements that are meaningful.
