Jul
07
Has your website’s content been stolen? How to find out, and how to respond
Recently Design by Reese’s content was stolen by another website, pretty much verbatim, and a client of ours also had a similar problem recently. While the client’s infringement was resolved almost immediately, we are still waiting for the owner of this other site to rework his content entirely. He has made some changes, since we issued him a notification of violation, that I think he believes sets his site apart enough from ours, but the front page of his site, the phrases he uses, even his meta keywords and their exact order and usage and the nature of his layout is still substantially a copy of our site and legal action will be taken accordingly if he does not completely rewrite his content so there’s no question of impropriety. He’s essentially taken the entire Reese brand, popped it in some different graphics, tossed in some SEO terms and called it his own. Not cool, but more importantly, not legal.
Because this is a relatively common phenomenon online, I thought I’d give a few pointers on how to handle it. By no means is this legal advice; obviously I’m not a lawyer and cannot give advice in that vein, but through consultation with my own lawyer (and if the owner of the site who is ripping us off is reading this, yes, we have a lawyer, and yes, we have the money to use him if you do not cease and desist immediately) as well as some resources online, I have a few tips on protecting the content and design of your site from copyright infringements.
- First, go to Copyscape.com, enter in your url, and see if you’re being stolen. Keep in mind this works best for content, as graphics can be easily renamed, but it’s a start.
- If Copyscape or another source informs you your content or graphics are ripped off by another site, check out the other site and look for a contact email. Sometimes this can be difficult to find, so copyscape has created a handy guide with ideas on how to find the site’s owner.
- Write an initial email to the owner notifying them of the copyright violation(s) and asking the offending content be removed by a specific date. State what further actions you will take (notifying the domain’s host, notifying applicable search engines of the violation) if the content is not completely removed by said date.
- If no reply is given and the content is not removed by the deadline, notify the site’s hosting company, which can be found through a whois search. Cite the specific instances in which your copyrights are being violated, note that you gave the owner of the site a deadline for removing the offending material and that the site’s owner has not removed the material.
- Notify search engines of the violation. If the site in question is concerned about search engine ranking and potentially being banned from search engines, this should stop them in their tracks. Copyright violations hurt rankings in general, which is part of why I’m such a stickler about this. (It degrades our own standings as well as those of the site that ripped us off). More information on google’s infringement process can be found here and here is a link to information on notifying other search engines can be found here.
- You may need to prove you’re the owner of the content in question by going to archive.org, which keeps a “history” of pages on the web and can show that your content historically precedes the copy of your content elsewhere.
- The above steps will usually result in the removal of the offending material, but if not, be prepared to take legal action. For a personal website or small business owner on a budget, this can be a pricey option, but if you own a company and have worked a lot on branding, as we have here, it’s something worth budgeting for, in my opinion.
There seems to be a correlation between my talk on a recent radio show and the theft of our content. It goes without saying that the more exposed you or your company becomes, the more likely you are to have your content stolen, and you need to guard against this with vigilance. Copyscape is a good place to start. You can also try typing in various phrases from your content into google with quotes around them (for example, “we make it easy for you to market your business online") to further detect violations. For image violations, go to google images and type in your image name. If you use generic names (e.g. header.jpg), consider creating more unique names for your images to make them easier to track. This is something we have to do with our own images soon. While it can time consuming to monitor the theft of your content, it’s important for the sake of both your search engine rankings and your branding.
July 7, 2006 - 4:51am
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