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]
<passes out the ritalin so everyone can focus>
Have you come across scraper sites where the robots.txt is using the google no archive tag? I stumbled across one today on yahoo when I was surfing around. These are difficult to find on google. I am wondering if you use msn, yahoo and ask to find sites like that.
Seems to be a growing trend with scrapers who do not rank good in google, but tend to rank better in other engines.
BTW, not all search engines index the same scrapers because each SE has their own anti-spam algorithms, except Yahoo perhaps, and you'll find some different scrapers in different SEs from my experience.
The issue is, are they using AdSense?
If so, now DMCA report 'em to Google regardless of their being indexed in Google.
If so, now DMCA report 'em to Google regardless of their being indexed in Google.
I'm not optimistic that the policy changes will help. One of the problems with DMCA is that it ends up meaning that NOBODY but the copyright owner can file any kind of complaint about copyright infringement, and that companies tend to completely ignore the most blatant and obvious copyright complaints unless the owner files.
Before DMCA I was able, as a concerned non-owner, to impact upon sites, etc that were blatant thieves, simply by bringing the issue to the attention of hosts, yahoo, or whatever relevant party.
As an example now, post DMCA, Yahoo will absolutely NOT even listen to a heads up about large amounts of copyright infringement on, let;s say a yahoogroup.
I wish companies would not use DMCA as a shield to ignore notifications. I hope google doesn't in this case, but I'm virtually sure it will.
Additionally, advertisers will trust google more and start spending more money once the scrapers are gone. Realize, some advertisers who pay for adwords get hits from sites that have scraped their own content! That will burn an adwords customer and it happens more than you think.
If the scraper obeyed robots.txt they wouldn't be scraping my site, end of story!
Robots.txt nominally grants readership rights (to robots) it does not imply or grant any rights with respect to reproduction of any part of the site. In particular, it should be noted that you cannot use robots.txt to instruct search engines to disable caching.
Kaled.
Realize, some advertisers who pay for adwords get hits from sites that have scraped their own content! That will burn an adwords customer and it happens more than you think.
THE EFFECT OF DEFENDANT'S USE ON THE POTENTIAL MARKET OF THE COPYRIGHTED WORKThis factor is generally held to be the most important factor. See Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539 (1985). This factor considers the effect that the defendant's use has on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his or her original work. The court will consider whether the use is a direct market substitute for the original work. The court may also consider whether harm to a potential market exists. The burden of proof here rests on the defendant for commercial uses, but on the copyright owner for noncommercial uses.
If someone sells widgets and their own text appears on a scraper site, tyhe site who stole his text is taking it to compete with him(her) for widget traffic and to make income from that traffic.
According to that provision for what fair use is, there's no way that scrapers can deny that they're using other people's content in order to influence the market - and compete against them. And there's no possible justification they can give in their own defense.
I wish companies would not use DMCA as a shield to ignore notifications.
I'm not sure what you think the difference is other than now they have a specific form to use, which is legal, and only takes a few seconds to fill out.
Not a big deal to fill out and it has the teeth of the law behind it.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 1:29 am (utc) on Jan. 22, 2007]
I'm not sure what you think the difference is other than now they have a specific form to use, which is legal, and only takes a few seconds to fill out.Not a big deal to fill out and it has the teeth of the law behind it.
My experience (as a pretty much past copyright "crusader"). Prior to DMCA, if I came across clear and obvious infringements, I had great success contacting the ISP or Yahoo (or whoever) and they would take action when things were really obvious, despite the fact that I didn't own the material, but just pointed it out to them.
After DMCA, companies refused to responds to anything but formal DMCA complaints from the owners. So, the result was, if I found stolen material, (and wanted to help), I'd have to locate the author/owner, identify how to contact them, contact them, explain to them how to do a DMCA, and who to do it with specifically, etc.
There's nothing wrong with DMCA. What's unfortunate is companies stopped responding to any copyright complaints that were NOT DMCA, and you can't file a DMCA unless you own it.
If google follows this pattern, if you, as a person hunting down scrapers (or thieves) try to contact google, but do NOT own the content in question, you'll get a "do a DMCA" which you CAN'T do because you have no standing. At least that's my understanding, IF google follows this pattern.
That was not there last week. So you might want to attempt to report that way as well.
That is VERY new, thanks for the heads up.
I wonder what the naysayers will say about this, nay?
That’s been there quite a while trinorthlighting. You get different things to fill out based upon the links you click on.
I’ve been in a peculiar argument with Google for six months about it. Google reps responded three times the form was for reporting Ads by Google, not for offenses by Google Adsense or Google Adwords. That left me scratching by head because the present and previous form ask you to report a violation.
The responses come from the address, Adsense <adsbygoogle@google.com>. I received about 15 responses. Many times they said they would forward the complaint to Adsense Abuse but upon checking with Adsense in early January they said they had no records of it based upon the original tracking code.
Primarily I was testing to see if they were taking abuse reports seriously and what was Google's definitive answer on framing. The offender had framed quite a few domains with Adsense ads. Google reps never answered the question or vaguely touched on it. I just keep the ball in play to see if they ever answer the question.
wrt copyright law, nobody has been able to show that google scraping to make money is any different than other sites scraping to make money... tell us the exact section of copyright law that is being violated... and fyi, ranting is not admissible in a court of law.
Consider that Blake A Field vs. Google was decided by a Nevada federal court in favor of google, ruling that google's caching of website pages was protected under fair use.
Seems pretty clear.
You can read the summary (written by someone who strongly disagrees with the courts decision) at: [hasbrouck.org...] where there is a link to the court case decision documents.
>When you choose the website button, there is now a choice you can check "The site is hosting/distributing my copyrighted content"That is VERY new, thanks for the heads up.
THANKS! I just reported an info pirate site containing a verbatim copy of one of my site's articles on a page chock full of AdSense ads. We'll see if it has any effect. I really like the reporting form's functionality, it's very clean.
I think that we've become so conditioned to NEVER click an adsense ad, we forget about the feedback link feature, and so we miss these kinds of features.
what's "pretty clear" mean? that you are using that court case to claim that scrapers are legal?
IMO Google should kick them out, but not based on some legal interpretation that's never been tested in court. They have lots of I-know-it-when-I-see-it clauses, such as the need to follow Google's general webmaster guidelines, and prohibiting pages which are published for the sole purpose of showing ads.
They can't. How can someone stealing content to put on their site to compete with the victim's site for the same customers for the same keywords be considered to be fair use? What's fair about it?
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
[edited by: Marcia at 4:06 am (utc) on Jan. 25, 2007]
Again, I'm not in favor, nor defending scrapers, but filling DMCAs? Be my guest....
I hate to be drawn into this again, but that position is highly questionable. Google's use of snippets is unquestionably Fair Use, and scrapers can make a strong case for the same thing.
The legal cases I looked at that google won (in particular caching of websites which involves way more taking of material) seemed to be decided on the basis of the benefits offered by google to the general public.
There's a huge distinction between a scrapper site which essentially offers nothing to visitors and google which clearly does. And so the courts seem to have determined.
Oh, and it's often longer than 10 words - like two sentences of an optimized description that's 25-30 words. And some don't even have a link to the sites they plagiarized.
And yes, taking a full sentence from a site and pulling it up at Google in quotes certainly CAN show the thief up in the SERPs higher than the victim. If is not fair use if it's for commercial gain and is in any way competing against the original author.
rbacal, you failed to mention that the perfect 10 case disagreed with that premise, and you still have not posted any court case that defines a difference between google scraping and other sites that are scraping.
where are the copyright cases for a 5-word sentence string that gets copied? or a 10-word string? where are the google guidelines telling you how many words it takes to be acceptable for a dmca filing?
Common, snippets, with short phrases no longer than 10 words ... how can that be called "original content" theft?Again, I'm not in favor, nor defending scrapers, but filling DMCAs? Be my guest....
