Content copied without permission

[tomcatuk]

First up, I spotted someone copying content from my site this week. He'd pasted together text from one of my pages, with another paragraph of text from another site and used it to make himself out an authority writer. This cobbling together of content seemed to work, and he pushed me below himself and Netscape (he'd also posted the content there). Presumably his domain has "trustrank" to be able to get away with this. His homepage has PR5 if that means anything at all.

I contacted him, told him he was out of order, and he has removed the content from his own site. The Netscape content remains though, although I have tried using their "report" link to point out that the text wasn't written by the submitter. Part of the message I sent him also pointed out that pretty much his entire site's content, on a huge variety of topics was written by other people and would he like me to contact 20-30 or so of them which may have helped sway his decision or not.

Now I'm starting to look at other sites that come up with top ten Google positions for keywords that relate to my site. Not sure whether to be surprised or not, but there are several that are populated with content that copyscape quickly and (seemingly accurately) reveals has been simply scraped, copied & pasted from other, much older sites.

Is is a serious nono for me to start reporting this kind of thing through Google? Would you do it if a site ranked better than yours for your favourite keywords on the strength of content they didn't (and quite likely would not be capable) of writing themselves?

[carpediem]

Hi tomcatuk,

It would depend on the content - are you the original owner? I would always notify them first before reporting anything to Google.

Legal info here:

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Hope that helps,

Danielle

[marcel]

expose him

[suzstephens]

The takedown procedure of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Safe Harbor provision are an excellent, no-cost way to go after copyright violators. I used it recently when my former sales representative, Cherie Young, illegally represented a dozen of my web site designs on her web site as if they were her own designs. It took a couple of weeks, but I was eventually able to get her ISP to block access to her pages that contained my site designs. Google "DCMA safe harbor takedown" to learn more about the process.

[bj]

Yes, you should go after content scraped from your own site, if you feel it's negatively impacting you. Oddly enough, I usually get traffic from the true scraper sites, which are pulling from my rss feed, since they have nothing else there except google ads, and people will click the attribution link if they like the content they're seeing. So weigh that a bit against what's actually taking place, and what it's doing or not doing to you.

Re going after sites that rank better than yours but are copying content that has been copied from sites other than yours? To me it would seem like your time would be better spent simply making your site as strong as it can be by adding more original content often and doing other stuff like linkbuilding.

[wige]

true scraper sites, which are pulling from my rss feed, since they have nothing else there except google ads, and people will click the attribution link

Would sites like this, which are reposting RSS content and provide an attribution link, be considered scraper sites? The original purpose of RSS feeds was to make the content available in a portable platform so the data could be embedded in other places, including web sites. I strongly doubt that RSS content would even be subject to the DCMA because by nature of being placed in a document designed to be reprinted infers an intent for that data to be public domain, or at least an attribution license. I think what is being referred to here is essentially plagerism, where the content in one web site is cut and pasted into another without permission (such permission could be implicit when content is put into a feed) or attribution.

Disclaimers: IANAL and all opinions are IMO

[halfmexi]

We spent 2 weeks and a few hundred dollars to produce a perfectly translated SEO services page for our Spanish clients... and within 2 weeks a site in Mexico took the content 'word for word' and made it into their 6 page SEO website! I guess we should be honored that we created such a good page, but... I went after him - 1 email direct to the offender (no reply), then the 2nd I copied his ISP. Fortunately the ISP was a legit group and they persued their hosted client - took a week, but finally our content pulled.

We got lucky... using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a slow drawn out process and he could have just changed the words around too. Always pays to check your log files, if I hadn't seen him coming to our site a dozen times I wouldn't have checked him out and he probably would have beat me and got some good rankings from our content in a few weeks.

You should attack these jerks head-on and usually the ISP can be your best friend in this situation, especially if you can prove your copy being of an older date than the thief's version. Leave the Search Engine's as a last resort.

BIL

P.S. that Spanish translated page is now the most popular and highest ranked page on our site - go figure?

[Jerryb]

I'm not sure if it's wrong but on my blogs I often use a paragraph from a site if it pertains to the subject of my blog. I always add a link and give credit to the site where I got the info. Saying "Click on this link for more".

Then again, I often get info from Wikipedia and refer back there.

I do blogs on subjects that interest me, but I can't know everything about those subjects so I spend a lot of time researching them.

I don't think it violates any copyright laws as long as you're not using the whole article and you are giving credit where credit is due.

Most web sites want the extra traffic that the links bring them, and most webmasters, I would think, would enjoy the fact that someone likes their work well enough to let others know about it.

Am I wrong?

[suzstephens]

Copyright attorney Ivan Hoffman has an article about blogging:
ttp://www.ivanhoffman.com/blogging.html

[wige]

As webmasters become more concerned about the search engines filtering of duplicate content, I think they will become more concerned about having their content copied. My advice would be to err on the side of caution and ask first if they don't have an explicit policy on the site. Wikipedia, for example, lists on every article their policy regarding reprinting the content (attribution license, they even have a link to generate an appropriate attribution statement).