Content Theft : How to Tackle Content Theft

Content Theft, piracy, copyright infringement as you may refer to it;

[eniolaakinduyo]

Content Theft, Copyright infringement as you may refer to it; is the enemy of content marketing. Imagine after spending days <snip> writing a content and then months constantly updating it; at the end of it all having a competitor or scammers copying your content word for word and even ranking higher than you.

What Would You Do?

This is the same situation I was in and I thought of it that there would a good number of other bloggers in this same situation being cheated by their competitors with higher DA.

This was my case. My competitors copied my content and they pushed me out of the first page to the second page.

It was more painful because that is the post driving about 50% of my blog traffic.
And now think of it to have it stolen by your competitors!

So in todays post, I will be sharing and would also want to learn the best method of tacklinking content theft.

Just think of this post as how far I have gone in getting my rights back.

1. Google DMCA Takedown notice

Google DMCA Takedown notice is a platform created by Google to reduce the incidence of content infringement. You visit the page and then file your takedown notice.

I have done this and I am still waiting for the response.

I pray I have a positive response.

2. Contact the WebMaster

This is one of the simplest method of tackling it, but most of the time it proves abortive.

Because in the first place, the webmaster must already know the repercussion before venturing into the act.

But you may try this too.
I tried this first and it all proved abortive.


3. Contact the Hosting Company
This is another method I recently learnt but have not being able to implement it.
This involves contacting the hosting company to make them aware that one of the site they are hosting is containing a copyrighted content.


These are three I know.

Experts in the house, please kindly share with us, how you have been able to deal with content theft and Negative SEO (this is another thing I will discuss with you next)

[edited by: engine at 1:08 pm (utc) on Jan 15, 2020]
[edit reason] No specifics, please see WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[not2easy]

Hello eniolaakinduyo and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Google DMCA takedown form is not generally successful without following their steps which would include contacting the site and contacting their host. If you are able to get Google to take action without those steps it may be that you have included some different legal recourse with your claim. Is that what you are doing?

Their DMCA Troubleshooter tool would be the place to begin: [support.google.com...]

Content theft is an ongoing problem for all of us. To get some ideas on how others have handled the situation you can find decades of experiences right here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[eniolaakinduyo]

Hi Not2easy,
Thanks for the quick response.

I tried contacting teh webmasters of the site involved but it all proved abortive.

I think the next thing I will have to do is to contact their host.

And about the legal recourse, how do I go about it?

[not2easy]

And about the legal recourse, how do I go about it?

You would consult a lawyer.

Since that costs you time and money, it is recommended to try first to resolve it without the courts. That link to Google's tools tells you how to complete each step.

In general, if the site that contains your stolen content is in the US, most hosts are 'Safe Harbor' hosts and will remove content if the owner of that site does not respond or does not remove your content. You must first determine whether their use of your content is actually a DMCA violation or if it is covered under the 'Fair Use' clause of DMCA. If they credit your site as the source for the content and if it is not the entire article, it may be allowed under 'fair use' and you could be fined for trying to remove it.

As stated in the Content, Copy Writing and Copyright Charter: [webmasterworld.com...]
The comments of WebmasterWorld members, moderators, and administrators are not legal advice; such advice should be sought only from a qualified legal professional in your jurisdiction who can review your facts and circumstances in detail.

[tangor]

@eniolaakinduyo

Glad to have ya. We can't do legal advice, but some commonsense is to fire off as many complaints/notices (DMCA or your nation's version of same) to as many places as possible.

MEANWHILE, use your logs to identify SCRAPERS, BAD ACTORS, and COUNTRIES OF SAME and take prophylactic actions (ie: ban them).

You can't prevent this 100% but you can knock out 90% as these re mostly lazy folks who think they are smarter than the rest of us. :(

[Kendo]

What they may all have in common is the excuse for their plagiarism, that "they had to start somewhere". I have heard this many times.

But you can't stop them. To them theft is a starting point when they have nothing. And having nothing they are not worthwhile suing because you won't even get your legal costs back. With larger companies, reputation is more important and fewer will steal or they will be more clever about being caught.

[explorador]

eniolaakinduyo: What Would You Do?

You describe a common problem that involves several stages of action, what to do depends on what stage you want to address specifically. Considering DMCA's or legal actions is ok but only address the last stage of the problem, it's like calling your car insurance company when you already crashed your car, it already happened.

You could build a better website, no, seriously. Yes this can happen to all of us but it's in our hands o build a faster website (serving your own content faster and better than your competitors so the algos on SE's bless you a bit. Another thing is to make sure the date of the content is visible and clear in ways the SE's can identify such data, sure they know WHEN they crawled your content but it's important that your website it's semantically correct.

And last but still important: make sure your website adds fresh content so the Search Engines visit you constantly (daily), this way your content will be added to the SE database at the right time (don't underestimate this). Why? people might easily monitor your website, see when you posted something new, copy the content, post it and get it indexed while the Search Engine probably still don't notice you have new content.

Post in smart ways. Sometimes it's better to add content silently without distributing it via social media or add it to your home page while it's not indexed, wait a while. Then you can notify whoever you want.

[Kendo]

What they may all have in common is the excuse for their plagiarism, that "they had to start somewhere".

Hahaha! Thought this was familiar and then noticed that I posted it :-)

[not2easy]

The discussion about blocking unwanted traffic has been split off to its own thread in the Apache Forum where such topics are welcome. You can find those posts here, under the title "Blocking Unwanted Traffic" : [webmasterworld.com...]