How to handle shady sites stealing partial homepage text

[rlopes]

I just found out that strips of my homepage text are being copied by lots of shady sites.
These pages don't make any sense. They copy short paragraphs of my homepage, and mix them with other text that don't make any sense at all.

Could this be negative SEO? What can I do to not be penalized for duplicated content?

[not2easy]

I would ignore it, it is "content" generation via scraper bots and it is about as old as the internet. Snippets from your content, jumbled with bits and pieces from other sites that ends up in throwaway sites won't cause you duplicate content issues. Unless you are into poring over your raw access logs and building up a database of bad UAs and IPs to block from your site, it can be ignored.

_{If you do want the additional chores to manage, you can start by reading the constant updates reported by others here: [webmasterworld.com...]}

[rlopes]

The problem is that my rankings seems to have suddenly dropped. And I just found these sites (first time I believe I've been highly copied)

[KCCatherine]

[support.google.com...] Use this page to investigate and report the content is you think it violates Google's Duplicate Content policy.

[martinibuster]

Contrary to what the above member posts, Google does not have a Duplicate Content Policy. There is only a USA law called, DMCA, that all organizations based in the USA must comply with.

1. Contrary to what the previous person posted, you will not likely be able to file a DMCA complaint against those sites because if they're only using a snippet then that may fall under the USA doctrine of Fair Use.

2. DMCA only works for USA based sites, USA based hosting, or USA based domain registrars because the DMCA is a USA law.

3. As long as you have decent PageRank then you have nothing to worry about from low quality sites like that. They're scrapers and they have always existed.

What's likely troubling your site is something else, like maybe Penguin?