Hi, I have a website with most of the content written by the community. What I notice is that people completely steal full tutorials from my site and publish them on their own site, claiming it's theirs... They even remove the watermarks from the images, they even make money of it by placing ads with it... What can be done against this? This is really frustrating
There is hardly much you can do, if these are simply scattered little thieves. One possible way is probably to contact their hosting company. You can try tracing their IP address to their hosting company and report them.
There's a lot you can do if you are the copyright holder (since you're saying the community creates the content, that may not be the case). If you do hold the copyright, these things can help: 1. Send a cease and desist notice to the content thief demanding that the content be removed from their site within a set period of time (I usually give them 48 hours). 2. If they don't remove the content, contact the major search engines with a dmca request to have the infringing pages removed from their index (especially important if the thief's site is ranking well for those copied works. 3. Also find out who's hosting the site, and if applicable send them a dmca request to have the infringing content removed from their servers. 4. And of course there's always legal action depending on how far you want to pursue it. Jenn
atleast write to google though, that they are copying so they may get banned by google SE . (phukers) I'm with you man .. Regards
Yap, you want to stop them from earning from the articles. If they have adsense you may want to contact google and have them terminate thier adsense account. Though it is easier said than done since you need storng proof of ownership to the said material
These members write exclusive for my site and all images have watermarks. I even pay them for it. The content thiefs cut out the watermarks from the images. So mailing google is adviced? I noticed they are using adsense on the pages with the stolen content...
OK. Sorry about that. When you said it was created by members of the community, I thought more like free posting (like a forum or social networking site). If it's the case that you're sure you have the copyright, contact Google, the host, and the advertisers.
I would contact the offender, contact the host and contact google. If that doesnt work then send a cease and desist to the hosting provider. If the hosting provider is a reseller then send it to the net block owner. You will need to check if I am correct here, but if you send a cease and desist to a provider they have to act unless the person who's account it is wants to challenge it legally. If not, then the host cannot restart the website or they risk getting shut down. I have only witnessed this as being part of a reseller once where the netblock owner had to act and could not legally bring the site back up.
Hi Content is many time possible to theft but try to put a banner from copyescape and put it there on your site. I have experience that then not much content will be theft
A banner from copyscape is essentially useless, and all you really do is make your site look cheap and promote their service for them. Be more professional and actually track down and pursue infringing content if it bothers you. A copyright notice is the only deterrent you should need directly on your site.