Copyright infringements - when people steal sections of your website

copyright infringement, google adsense

[zarathustra2011]

Fortunately to date, I've had no-one replicate my google adsense code, but I've been running a number of searches this month on unique sentences from text I've written myself, and have found sites where it's been reused.

I'm not sure how harmful such duplicate content can be to SEO, and whilst most sites I've contacted have taken action and removed the graphics and text they've used without permission, there's others that just ignore all contact. One of them is based in India and uses GoDaddy, but GoDaddy want information that can be hard to obtain before they'll do anything.

I'm sure there's plenty of successful website creators in this forum - what do you do? Just let sleeping dogs lie, or bring out the big guns?

[Play_Bach]

Have you tried calling GoDaddy and talking with someone there? I've found a phone call often gets things done. A few years ago I had adult referrer links in my logs. I looked up who was hosting those domains and called them to let them know how their servers were being used. Running adult anything was against the hosting company's TOS, so they were more than happy to cancel the accounts. Problem solved.

[edited by: Play_Bach at 11:55 am (utc) on Apr 6, 2012]

[zaktoo]

I have 30-40 domains that have simply replicated my content, plus a couple that sell my database and simply deny that it's mine. All I can really do is hop that they meet a particularly nasty and painful death.

[zaktoo]

hope*

[Leonard0]

If the thief is using Adsense on their site file a DMCA complaint with Adsense.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[netmeg]

Yea there are various other forums here that deal with this issue, if it's not directly AdSense related. You file with Google to get them out of the SERPs, and you file with the hosting company to get the content taken down. Of course, if they're not subject to DMCA, then it gets more complicated.

[zarathustra2011]

I can try calling them, but I don't even know how to go about establishing my copyright. They can see that they've stolen one picture, and put the wrong picture with the wrong text, and hopefully that my original article has been online on my website since 2006. I can show them original photographs, full size and uncompressed, but other than that I guess I'll just have to wish the perpetrators a slow painful death.

I feel for you zaktoo. I guess once enough different people have copied your material, it becomes harder and harder to establish your authority as the original owner.

Will wait to see if the offending sites get back to me, then I will try their hosting companies, and finally Google.

[zarathustra2011]

There's a VERY popular website out there, that pulls in a great deal more figures than mine, yet it uses PHP and iframes to display other people's contents - there's virtually nothing original on the site. When I search for a sentence from my site, this website comes up before my own (it links to every single one of my articles, and uses sections of my texts to promote it). Whilst this does bring me some extra traffic, it's not enough to warrant this kind of violation.
I've never reported anybody before now, but I sent a message to Google, and today this website is not accessible - just times out, so I figured they have actually done something about it, and the copyright thief is desperately working behind the scenes. They'll probably keep their site as it is, and simply put somebody else's adverts on there is my guess.
Anyhow, for now it seems like a positive result.

[zeus]

I have just have some success, two sites which scrapes 100.000 of domains with there content (like page source), with whois..... I have reported them to google and adsense, now it looks like there scraped content is gone.

[wolfadeus]

I agree with Play_Bach, try to call, often the only way to sort these things quickly.