Decided to be much more aggressive in protecting copyright

[ChanandlerBong]

I have a content site with about 4000 pages. Every one penned by myself, so I know if I find copies, I'm sending DMCA.

I have a free section and a premium section. Let's just say I gave up protecting the free content about 6-7 years ago. It was just too depressing going through the discovery process, entering terms between quotation marks in google, etc, etc. It really got me down, it was actually depressing me, looking under that rock every time to find a host of parasites that had stolen content.

So I stopped. I stopped lifting the rock. I still tried to stay on top of protecting my premium content.

Then in October I found a site that was offering basically my whole Premium site for sale and my attitude hardened. Because the whole process of 'discovery' depressed the bejesus out of me, I outsourced the job on a freelancer site, got someone to do an exact match search on every page of my site, free and premium, and I now have an excel file with SIX THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED infringing URLs listed, page by page. It cost me quite a lot to get to this stage.

Now, I will try and get as many of those deleted as possible, first through direct DMCAs to doc hosting sites (we all know the worst offenders), then use google/bing to clear up the remaining mess. I've got scribd to already delete over a thousand pages, about 20% of my total.

This will be a long process, but one which makes me feel good, like I'm doing something positive and constructive.

What do you do to protect your content or have you given up to some extent?

[engine]

Let me first of all say, I sympathise, and also wholeheartedly agree with your hardening attitude.

One thing you might want to do is if you find they are a business, or individual, and you are able to track them down, send them an invoice in a similar way that Getty Images do, but not to retain the content, for the use of up to a particular date. Make it easy and accept payment via paypal. Quite likely you'll be ignored, but there's some satisfaction in knowing you've got the upper hand an know who they are.

[keyplyr]

What do you do to protect your content or have you given up to some extent?

We try to stop them at the door. If they don't get the content, they can't republish it. The following has worked very well:

• Block all known IP ranges from bad neighborhoods, VPN, anonymous services, etc

• Block all known server farm IP ranges allowing only beneficial agents through

• Block all known scraping agents (MS Office, Wordpress, PDF tools, feedfetchers, etc)

• Block all behavior patterns associated with scraping content done from spoofed UAs

• Block abnormal request headers (missing fields, malformed headers, etc)

• File switch hot-linked images & PDF with an image displaying a copyright notice.

• Use tracking methods inside content to determine source of infringement

There is still a high level of daily maintenance required. I run my raw server logs through some code that shows various points of interest for me to manually follow up.