12 years, 3 months ago-
Posts
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I have a bit of a dilemma today. I received a ping back on my most recent post. The site that the pingback is coming from is about building a shed for yourself. My blog is called The Shelter Shack, and it is about animal shelters and rescues, but when you google it you do get a lot of responses revolving around a physical shelter. My assumption is that this website might be an auto-blog?
In one respect I should be happy that another blog is spreading the word for animals even if their website has nothing to do with animals. Although I would prefer it to not be on their site.
Here’s the other part of my dilemma: this site pretty much just lifted my post verbatim (copy and photos). The only thing they didn’t include was the rafflecopter code and linky list code. It looks like they are also hosting the photos on their site and not just embeding the image source code from my site.
I’m not real sure what to do here. The extra traffic that could see my post on their site is probably pointless, because it’s not even close to the same target market. I also feel like they are violating copyright laws, and since they’re lifting my post verbatim, google’s going to frown on it in the search rankings.
Any suggestions/advice from the community would be appreciated.
-Steph
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Hi Stephanie,
I don’t know how far you might want to push this and in most cases, if the site that’s re-publishing my content is reasonably relevant, gives me credit, and includes a link back to the original, I just let it go and “hope” there’s a net gain in exposure and traffic. I’m pretty sure that tracking them down and enforcing our copyrights could become a full-time job — and not one I want! ;-p
Your example sounds exceptional, however, so here are some leads to what your rights and remedies may be under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):
- A recent GigaOm article comparing DMCA with the proposed SOPA law and giving some insight into how much misery you may be able to cause the infringer – http://gigaom.com/2011/11/27/with-friends-like-the-dmca-who-needs-s…
- IPWatchdog post from a couple of years ago, describing his own experience very similar to the way you describe yours and how he dealt with sending a DMCA “take down” letter, complete with a sample form that he grants permission to use (but please note his disclaimer) – http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/07/06/sample-dmca-take-down-letter/id=4501/
- DMCA.com is a company mentioned in another IPWatchdog post that will sell you a DIY Takedown Kit for $10, or do a “Professional Takedown” for you at $199 that they say is “100% Guaranteed” (they also have free badges and a WordPress plugin on their homepage, but I have no experience to share on any of their stuff) – http://www.dmca.com/Takedowns.aspx
As the IPWatchdog’s disclaimer puts it: “Unfortunately, in law there are few typical situations.” All we can do is try our best to look at prior examples and adapt them to our own situations.
I hope the above helps you navigate yours and that you’ll let us know how you decide to handle this. Your example might then help the next one of us with a similar problem.
Thanks for sharing!
Tom
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We have zero tolerance for this because the major search engines now penalize for duplicate content.
It also annoys me that I spend a great deal of time researching and writing original content, then someone can come along and turn a profit from it without even bothering to ask permission.
THEN I often get the sob story about how they don’t know any better, but seriously, when did we learn about plagerism? Grade four? I also had one lie and say they got the content from somewhere else, and then expected me to feel sorry for her. Seriously….LOL.
They also try to pull that ‘fair use’ nonsense which (according to legal counsel) doesn’t apply to this at all, nor does ‘educational’ apply, especially when they’re profiting from their site.
I warn first, and the plan of action doesn’t only include legal action. Affiliates such as Amazon and Google strictly prohibit advertising on websites with illegal content, including copyrighted content. A good kick in the wallet certainly gets their attention. ISP’s will also remove websites for publishing copyrighted content without permission.
Most writers stand together in a zero tolerance policy for this behavior in an attempt to convey the message that it is wrong and punishable. We work hard for our money and content theft is every bit as wrong as stealing anything else we’ve worked for.
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Oh nothing makes my blood boil more! This has happened to me on more than one occasion. Here are some links for ideas on how to deal with it:
“Repurposing Blog Content: How do you handle it?”
and
“Beware of Blog Content Pirates” – this has great info about copyright infringement that you may want to review.
Good luck! Hope this helps.
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So sorry to hear you are going through this and I’m glad Tom posted first because he gathered a lot of good info for you (that I’ll be checking out myself – just to have the knowledge.) From personal experience, I can tell you that whenever I’ve come across someone else’s content that I’ve wanted to share on my blog, I ALWAYS ask in an email first and make sure to also ask how they would prefer me to post it.
That said, a friend of mine (also a blogger) has found her material pirated on at least two blogs. She has posted her “you didn’t have my permission to use my content and are in violation of….” directly onto the blog in question with the added comment that she’d appreciate their talking her material down, and in both instances, the bloggers did just that.
Don’t know if this is helpful to you or not. I’ll be very interested to hear how you resolve this one, Stephanie.
Kathy
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Doesn’t it stink when it happens. I had it happen with my blog. Basically they were scaping my content from my RSS feed along with other blogs. I think this is the site I found that helped make everything clear for me as to what to do-http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-internet-plagiarism/4-contacting-the-host/
I got the site owner’s name and email address from Whois and emailed them asking them to please not use my content, but got no response. I then found out the company his site was hosted on. The only problem was that I found conflicting information. Depending on where I looked, 2 different sites showed as hosting this website. I found from reading that it is not uncommon for this( can read why this might be the case here)> I don’t remember how I decided but I sent a DMCA complaint to one. I never heard back and decided not to pursue having their content removed from Google because after reading about doing this I felt I should have some legal counsel and I couldn’t afford a lawyer to handle what is a no income blog. This site wasn’t even showing on any searches i did to look and see where they were at in Google. I did change my RSS from full post to excerpt (which I hated doing) and i added a copyright notice to my bylaw because that showed on the pirating blog and I just wanted it there to let any readers know. I decided to put it out of my mind since this site wasn’t hurting or helping my blog.
I hadn’t done checked on the site in quite a while, but went and looked for it a few weeks ago and found the account had been suspended and the site was gone. I felt such joy! I’m not sure if my letter had anything to do with it but they are gone at least.
Google Panda changes that began in February are suppose to help prevent sites like this from ranking above the original site. The scraping site in my case never ranked higher than me so I can’t say how it affected their ranking.
Not sure I provided any info that helped. In searching for the blog above, I found this post on things you may want to do to prevent content scraping- http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-blog-content-scraping-how-to-stop-it/ It might help give someone ideas for their blog.
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Thanks for all of the responses! @Tom & Dawn – the links have been helpful. @Rene – thanks for posting the link to “Repurposing Blog Content: How do you handle it?” I knew this topic had come up before in the community, but I couldn’t find the post. Looks like I should take my own advice and install the “disable right click” plug-in to block people from pirating my images! lol
This is the first time I’ve ever found my blog content on someone else’s website. If the website were even remotely animal related I would probably not worry about it and just let it be. The site does give a link back to my original post. However the site has nothing to do with animals, and every post on that site seems to be plagiarized content coming from other websites. There are absolutely no advertisements on this website, and as far as I can tell, I’m not seeing any affiliate links either. So I just don’t get why they’re even bothering to risk copyright violations.
I’m not entirely sure I need to do anything right now, as I went back to the site this afternoon, and my post is no longer listed in their blog home feed or as a link in their recent posts widget (it showed up in both of those locations this morning). The crazy thing is though that if I go to the direct link I have for the blog post, it will still come up. Maybe my browser has just cached the page, and that’s why I’m still seeing it. I’m going to check it out when I get home tonight.
If I can still access that page when I get home, I’ll submit a comment asking them to take the page down. I’ll let you know what happens.
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Unfortunately, they get around automatic duplicate content detection. The one I nailed this morning, (badly) paraphrased half of my article, pasted the other half, and then added an affiliate endorsement for dog food.
Luckily my Son’s friend is a corporate lawyer who gets just as enraged as I do over copyright infringement. He loves slapping these lowlifes silly in court…LOL. Usually reporting them to their affiliates does the trick though – they steal our content to make money after all.
Lots of great info above – being armed and dangerous is half the battle.
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I always wanted to just do several days of posts that said nothing but “This site steals content from other blogs”, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to deter anyone who might stop by my blog and see that as my content.
I assumed the site that was scraping my content did so to make money, but I never saw any ads or affiliate links so wouldn’t have been able to report them. The person who owned the scraping site lived in China. I’m not sure what the exact purpose of sites like that is if they are making money off ads or affiliates.
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Hi Kathy,
My stat’s showed the link back. It will also show in the comments if ‘pingbacks’ are enabled. This one had linked to my site which I guess he thought would make the theft just fine with me if I caught him. He was wrong.
Dawn, some build the traffic first and then insert ad’s once the ranking is up there, while others use it to distribute malicious downloads, viruses, etc. They can also build traffic to a domain with the intent to sell it later. I’m not sure what other reasons they’d have, but you can bet they’ll benefit one way or another.
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Well I checked the site from my home computer, and I can still get to their version of my blog post even though it’s no longer showing up in their home feed. I submitted the following comment to the post:
To whomever is administering this website. My name is Stephanie Hulett and I operate the website thesheltershack.com. My website is about animal sheltering and rescueing and does not have anything to do with Shed building. The post you have above is a direct copy of a blog post from my website and I respectfully request that you remove it from your website. You do not have my permission to display it here. Thank you for your time. – Stephanie Hulett
Hopefully they’ll honor my request.
@ Kathy, I found out that my blog post was pirated because the site did include a link back to my original post. WordPress will track ping backs like that in the comments section of the admin panel. Not all websites will include a link back. I sometimes will copy and paste the first couple of sentences from my post into google and see if any duplicates turn up.
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Nicely worded “cease and desist” comment. Let’s see how fast he/she takes it down. I do have a self-hosted WP blog and I do have the free version of site meter so that I can track visitors to my site. Now, all I have to do is figure out how to interpret some of those site meter reports…
Stephanie Hulett said:
Well I checked the site from my home computer, and I can still get to their version of my blog post even though it’s no longer showing up in their home feed. I submitted the following comment to the post:
To whomever is administering this website. My name is Stephanie Hulett and I operate the website thesheltershack.com. My website is about animal sheltering and rescueing and does not have anything to do with Shed building. The post you have above is a direct copy of a blog post from my website and I respectfully request that you remove it from your website. You do not have my permission to display it here. Thank you for your time. – Stephanie Hulett
Hopefully they’ll honor my request.
@ Kathy, I found out that my blog post was pirated because the site did include a link back to my original post. WordPress will track ping backs like that in the comments section of the admin panel. Not all websites will include a link back. I sometimes will copy and paste the first couple of sentences from my post into google and see if any duplicates turn up.
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Just a quick note along the lines of copyright issues. I wonderful reader saw one of my pictures being used to sell a dog treat bakery business plan on amazon and was nice enough to let me know. I searched for that image, using the google image search, and found it was being used on 15 other sites. I then searched for a lot more of my photos and found them all over the place (and being used for the weirdest things ..)
So just a tip, drag any of your photos or pictures into the google image search tool bar and you may be surprised, unpleasantly, where you find them being used. -
Read this post in my blog reader this morning and thought it a good post about comment trolls- http://bestbloggingtipsonline.com/beating-blog-comment-trolls/
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