Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.
Ladies and Gentlemen, fire up your word processor and start firing off DMCA [google.com] letters if you've been scraped.
Account TerminationMany Google Services do not have account holders or subscribers. For Services that do, Google will, in appropriate circumstances, terminate repeat infringers. If you believe that an account holder or subscriber is a repeat infringer, please follow the instructions above to contact Google and provide information sufficient for us to verify that the account holder or subscriber is a repeat infringer.
It would appear that if enough people file against the scrapers, they will lose their accounts.
It's about time.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:38 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2007]
Any legal eagles here...if my Adsense account is in say China and my site is on Google China and Google closes my account I think I can sue them as I have not breached any laws in China have I? assuming China does not subscribe to these laws; so this would be "wonton" discrimination. Copyright laws do have borders.
If Google is practicing "wonton" discrimination, a lot of Chinese cookery sites will be in the soup. :-)
Seriously, people are getting too hung up on the DMCA, international copyright laws, etc. when the simple fact of the matter is that Google can terminate accounts at any time for any reason, just as publishers can quit the program at any time for any reason. See clause 6 of the AdSense Terms and Conditions.
If Google doesn't want to do business with you any longer, it doesn't have to--whether you're a content thief (black hat), a scraper (grey hat), an original content creator (white hat), or a reincarnated Mother Teresa. It's that simple.
Does the G Adsense program contribute to G's bottom line? Yes I think so? Whats up who here wants to start a G Adsense Publisher Association. I.e GAPA.
Really do we think that we are being treated unfairly with this rule that rule. Is Google the "internet police". Lets come together and put our collective voice to Google and tell them the things we like and dont like. A global voice and not just the US! What say you IB and EUROPE..?
Lets take a vote on this all in favor....
Google can terminate accounts at any time for any reason
But that is the point of this thread though. If Google just said "do not put ads on these sites because we do not want you to" then life goes on.
But by Google using the DMCA as a ruse it opens up a different way of thinking that was explored in this thread.
But I do concede that nothing said here will matter much as Google will just do what they want anyway.
But I really don't like to start each sentence with the word 'but' :-)
JAG
If Google is practicing "wonton" discrimination, a lot of Chinese cookery sites will be in the soup. :-)
I am worried partners who gladly use my articles under given permission definitions might be troubled now.
Can anyone comment on this or would it be wise to start a new thread on this specific topic?
Are you trying to put About.com out of business? :-)
I wish; they are the WORST of the ones I have to deal with as far as swiping from my site, word for word.
I sometimes wonder if About.com is an MFA site.
Doesn't NYT own About.com? ("NY Times buys About.com for $410m cash" by The Register)
The New York Times Co is stumping up $410m cash for Primedia's About.com. It says the combination of About.com's 22 million monthly users and its 13 million users will make it the world's 12th biggest company on the internet. It will cross-promote NYTimes products to About.com and intends to improve the content and visibility of its new baby. *Google*, Times Warner, Yahoo! and Jeeves also reportedly expressed interest in buying About.com, which goes to show how paid-for search advertising has transformed the dotcom landscape.
Shouldn't they know better? We should be able to get their attention now. I saw something recently taken from one of my sites. It is so obvious they exist more for ads than anything else, i.e., for profit, so they should PAY for stuff instead of taking it like some teenagers building a fan site.
One of my competitors which had top SERPs apparently sold his site to a big new network company. His site was full of lifted content (est. 99%), which the new owner continues to display. Feel like writing them a letter. "Do you realize..."
If one can't get the big companies to respect copyright law. . .
What's really annoying is when one of these scrapers/copiers gets higher SERPs (for some strings) and they take not just your content but your money (visitors clicking on their ads instead of yours).
I wish Google engineers were smart enough to algo the scrapers into outer cyberspace!
p/g
Then the robot's owner, during the auto theft trial, claims the car owners should have posted a "Don't steal this car" notice in a manner the robot could read.Like I said, please correct me if I misunderstood the point.
I guess that it's one interpretation of what I said, but the analogy fails because there is no benefit to anyone apart from its owner when the robot steals the car, and the owner of the car is also down by 1 car.
The point I was trying to make - and I probably shouldn't have since it's not really what this thread is about - is that there are significant benefits from having a default ALLOW culture on the internet. Being able to aggregate, compare and contrast vast amounts of content is one of the key abilities of the internet - many of the sites that are my initial jumping off points when surfing fall into this category. These services can only exist because they are opt-out rather than opt-in. Very draconian enforcement of copyright has (purely IMO) more downsides than upsides.
Basically I'm taking what is pretty much the typical slashdot view of copyright, and bringing it up on a forum of small content producers whom I know very well feel protective towards their content. It's somewhat off topic for the thread however, so I'd probably better leave it at that.
Any legal eagles here...if my Adsense account is in say China and my site is on Google China and Google closes my account I think I can sue them as I have not breached any laws in China have I? assuming China does not subscribe to these laws; so this would be "wonton" discrimination. Copyright laws do have borders.
Don't have to be a legal eagle. When you signed up for AdSense you agreed to Googles terms and conditions. It has nothing to do with what country you are in, you still agreed to the rules set in place and also agreed to all future changes to those rules. Let me get this straight, you want to be able to steal from companies/sites based in the USA and are whining because you may be held accountable for stealing...hehe Don't look for too much sympathy.
The right thing to do is to ask permission to use content or write your own content!
if you have a Google AdSense account, you are subject to the set of laws from the USA and the contract terms from that company.
so you are in china, you have made a contract with a USA firm. You agreed to the terms and condition within that contract to deal within the scope of USA laws and the terms that Google stipulates.
As long as Google does not break the law in the USA and in China, and as long as you don't break the TOS with Google, you both live up to the agreement.
NOW, the problem with this type of contract is that, if you ( the publisher ) wish to deal with Google, you need to understand that Google is allowed to update the contract and change the terms in that contract. it's one sided, towards goggles favor, but from what i have learned about contract law and laws in general, it has to be fair. if it's abusive it could be challenged.
In this case, Google is making people very aware of it's views about scrapers and "evil" type behavior, also they provide a remedy for that behavior. and how you should not be subject to it if you have followed their TOS. ( don't forget that the AdSense TOS talks about original content, so if you are a hardcore scraper then you will be dealt with )
I hope this helps
AdSense Policy Update Puts Scrapers on Notice: DMCA May Be Invoked?
About time!
IMO, this has the potential of changing the web for the better, eliminating the incentive MFAs had for creating piles of scraped content junk just so they can stick some adsense code on and make easy mony.
* Will this change in policy will eventually unclog the SERPs?
* Are we back to the good old post adsense days when your site ranking actually made some sense and a crawler was a crawler and not some obsessed, erratic anti spam ober-filtering device?
I'M betting on "YES" for both questions.
(in the not too distant future anyway...)
[edited by: Web_speed at 2:16 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2007]
I'm not sure how people defend stealing with something to the effect they stole the content, put work/money into translating it another language, so now it's theirs? Hmm..I wonder if that would work as a defense, "But judge, do you realize how much time and money I put into stealing that car and having it repainted".
That's exactly what translating to another language does, simply repaints the content.
Are we back to the good old post adsense days....?
Unfortunately, NO.
Other advertising programs have proven to be more than willing to fill the advertising void left on pages when MFAs are booted from AdSense.
The only thing we can hope is that those programs prove to be financially inadequate and the scrapers lose interest.
Additionally, for the publishers who have good sites, that means more advertising dollars. The advertisers will start trusting the content market more than they do now.
A lot of adwords customers question traffic that comes from scraper types of adsense sites, so instead of researching the content network and hand picking the sites to advertise they opt out of the content network totally! Hopefully this will change...
I have not read all the posts but I don't think this will be applied to scrappers
Um, if you haven't read all the posts how the heck would you know?
I'll be filing those DMCA complaints and we'll see what happens.
but is it really just the pot calling the kettle black?
Try using that as a defense if you get booted from AdSense for copyright infringment. (But officer, you were driving at 100 mph with a loaded gun in your car!) :-)
Scraping other people's content to use on sites with no redemptive value whatsoever, with the intention of directly profiting from the thievery, against the owners' wishes, is not fair use of other people's property.
Copyright and Fair Use [chillingeffects.org]
[edited by: Marcia at 10:24 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2007]
Search giant Google is the recurrent demon invoked in most legal discussions involving trademark infringement.
For those who might not know, trademark issues and copyright issues are almost completely different from each other. Owning trademarks confers a legal responsibility on the owner to enforce the trademark rights, or LOSE those rights, something that isn't the case with copyrights.
In any event, I guess this thread has slipped from a discussion of scraper sites, to a discussion of google's right or lack of rights to include content in their indexes. Too bad.
slipped from a discussion of scraper sites, to a discussion of google's right or lack of rights to include content in their indexes. Too bad.
The issue is strictly about the Adsense program and dealing with participants who are deliberately infringing upon the rights of other people for profit.
somehow i don't think that tidbit of misguided wisdom will curry favor with the trademark owners :-)
>>>Google's inclusion of informative data about sites in organic search without any money changing hands not only benefits sites getting exposure for FREE<<<
google copies entire sites and scrapes parts of that for their search results, and then monitizes it with advertising... they do NOT do it for free, they make money off of your content.
i'm glad to let google do that :-) but i'm not going to ignore the relevant corporate morality issues that google has... it's always kinda sad to see how a paycheck can cloud moral vision, isn't it?
>>>For those who might not know, trademark issues and copyright issues are almost completely different from each other.<<<
nope, it all falls under the umbrella of intellectual property protection, and the manner in which google handles it.
go ask those book people who are suing google if the big g is honoring copyrights... or ask the guy who is suing google over his reginald denny video appearing on youtube, without his permission.
I've been checking some major scraping operations I found that I reported to Google over a month ago and NONE of them are running AdSense at this time. [SNIP] The upside is AdSense has definitely vanished from many thousands of scraper sites.
IncrediBILL has been one of the leaders here in tracking AdSense scraper sites, and I look forward to reading his future reports--especially if he's filing DMCA complaints and tracking the results.
IncrediBILL has been one of the leaders here in tracking AdSense scraper sites
Maintaining the integrity of the Adsense program and trying to safeguard the quality of the ad audience's experience can do nothing but benefit not only publishers who want Adsense to be running ads that present targeted, relevant (and decent) sites for their visitors, but also benefit Adsense advertisers with legitimate, quality sites as well, who value their branding.
Advertisers pulling out of the content network altogether to avoid worthless junk traffic sent by worthless, ugly junk sites doesn't do anyone any good.
A framed page (with the framing site's URL in the address bar)
Not only are they stealing our full content but I think in some cases they have caused individual pages to plummet in the serps.
Ask yourself the following:
1)Do you have "clearly" posted steps on your site for getting your bot to crawl/index?
2)Do you have "clearly" posted steps on removing content that is on your site?
3)Does your bot follow robots.txt rules and robots meta tag?
4)Do you run a clearly uniquely identifiable bot consistently from the same IP range(s)?
5)You certainly don't post others snippets/text etcetera on "static pages" (Google or other SE's do not) - right?
Also, since "You" like to compare yourself to Google:
1)How many 1000's of employees do you have?
2)Is your stats of users in the same range of users as Google?
3)How many patents does your method for collecting/retrieving/displaying results hold?
4)How many billions of $ are you worth?
5)How many billions/millions of $ have you invested in displaying results?
6) How many millions do you have invested in hardware?
7)How large is your legal department?
Now I'm not a cheerleader for Google, but please stop embarrassing yourselves or getting delusional that what you do is "no different than Google" and that you "are just like Google". About 99% of the scrapers I have seen offer no workable method of contact.
Now I'm not a cheerleader for Google, but please stop embarrassing yourselves.
Well said. And maybe it's worth saying once more that it's possible, if one has an agenda, to start a new thread, rather than hijack ones that are really valuable. This is a perfect example of how we start out talking about policy updates, scrapers, and DMCA, and end up with people embarrasing themselves by not being able to follow the thread.
If you want to talk about google doing evil, google violating copyright, or show your confusion about trademarks and copyrights, it's simple to start a new thread, and those interested can play in that sandbox, and those wanting talk about more specific issues can do so without having to wade through all the "I have something to say, and I'm going to say it whether it fits the thread or not" folks.
Come on, guys. Embarrass yourselves in your own threads. We's just workin here, or trying to.
Also, most of the issues put forth by The Contractor are irrelevant as to the legal issues involved. I can only see that (2) and (3) from the first section are germane to the relevant copyright law. And the implication that the difference is that Google are a billion-dollar company, and you're not, is almost offensive.
