Copied content - how many percents to report

They only takes only 3-5 sentences for each page, is it worth reporting?

[lakr]

Dear all,

I have discovered that one of my competitors built a similar-to-mine website (design, content).

Their design is about 40% similar to mine
They copied the Yahoo's Font Logo (is it valid to use Yahoo's font for creating Logo?)
Content: For each page on their website, they stole: 3-5 sentences on my websites. (The can-be-found-no-where sentences.) The others, they copy from other websites, it means that each website, they stole 3-5 sentences to combine their own.

is it worth to file a DMCA to Google for this copy?

best,

Lkr

[RandomDot]

Don't know - back in the day people claimed copyright on meta tags for evil spirits sake... anything goes, if it bothers you that they took a few sentences from your site, go ahead and file a DMCA, if it's that important and makes a difference -

[tedster]

This is very a common auto-generated scraper site scenario. Whether it is truly a copyright violation or not is a fine point of the law that I don't think has ever been decided in a court.

If you see that it's affecting your rankings and traffic, then it might be worth your energy. Otherwise there may be more fruitful ways to spend your time.

[soapystar]

clearly depends on where you are geographically, in the UK my legal advice was that this is still copyright infringement (just a small snippett used)as long as the text is not of a generic type (i.e talking about a kettle and saying it has a handle and pours hot water...)

[lakr]

Thank you all for your great Advice.

Soapystar, you mean, it is still copyright infringement, for example:

"Wikipedia is an free online encyclopedia" or

"There are 40 flights per day from USA to UK on American Airlines"

They are the true-in-any-case sentences.

Then

When Our competitor repeats the above sentences means that they are still violating the CRight?

best,

Lkr

[soapystar]

im not a lawyer. My understanding is that your examples border on the generic.

[followgreg]

Drop a cease and desist from certified mail. Copy their hosting and registrar. That mostly do the trick.
In the meantime make sure you can proove ownership.
They may want to fight back.

[Quadrille]

If all they do is copy other people's stuff (including yours), then I'd report them.

If they USE other people's stuff - eg excerpts of film reviews etc, with credit, it may well be fair usage.

If it's in between, check with a lawyer if the cease and desist fails.

[ecmedia]

If I acted on every single scraper like this one, that would be my full time job - I would have to abandon my real business. Copying is a form of flattery, as they say. Jokes aside, this sort of scraping is standard practice by crooks so just focus on creating good content and keeping your visitors impressed. That is the best way to thrive in the content business. These scrapers do make money but every visitor visits their website only once, by mistake, but if you have a good website people return, talk about it, put links, etc.

[outland88]

Google's got the technology to stop this scraping. If they can do it at You Tube they can do it with their Adsense program. Its time some of this mess stopped.