Hey I have a website on which I post a new article each day. More often than not, these articles will be reposted by other people on web forums and such. They will be posted in their completion, despite the fact that I have a message on the website saying that they shouldn't be. My concern is that the search engines will no longer see my content as unique when people do this. Do you think this is a valid concern? I don't know how to stop. Maybe I can't. Any ideas? Cheers crystalgrid
What I'd do is post a follow-up message in the thread stating that the article is yours, is copyrighted, was taken without permission and posted, and that the complete posting and other articles written by you could be found at www.whatever.... At least get some good advertising out of this. On the other hand, if it's a blog, complain to both the blog owner and the hosting company and see if one or the other will force a take-down. Usually they will comply pretty quickly on being found out.
YES complain to the host but you should mention below your articles that publishing this article without any permission is illegal
Have they paraphrased your articles? If they do paraphrasing then I think it would be ok but if not then it is copyright infringement. I think when they do copy they should at least give credit to source or probably they can attach your links as well.
This happened in one of the forums I moderate. I did a check on Google / copyscape and since the user that posted it was a male and the original post (or earlier post) was a female and the posted on our forum declined to reply, we removed it. If you have good moderators and administrators to run a message board, usually they will handle / delete the posts if reported
I have so far run into at lest three forums where moderators and administrators are the ones stealing content from my websites to make posts in their forums, when I register and report it they usually delete my posts and ban me. I think I'll need a lawyer soon to file bunch of lawsuits.
It is impossible to manage that and hotlinking problems. It is really a big issue with the Internet in my mind. For the growing percentage of people trying to make a living in cyberspace, who will try to do it the old fashioned way, and who will just aggregate others content for their gain...
I will tell you what we have done in cases like this... 1. Contact the owner of the site of course. Let them know if it is not removed within a certain time frame you will be contacting the host, google, and advertisers. 2. Contact the host to get the content removed. Do a whois find out where the nameservers are pointing to and this is the host. 3. Contact google and file the proper DMCA paperwork to get the site removed from google and possible adsense account suspended. http://www.google.com/dmca.html 4. Contact any affiliate programs (vauleclick, adsense, YPN, etc) the site has running where your article is displayed. They are also making money off your content and will remove the account of the person. In all cases it may take a couple emails, if you have a layer have them send the email. If not, make it sound as legal as possible and keep it professional.
DMCA notice is always the way to go. First send it to owner, wait a day, send it to the host, wait a day, send it to the host that they are reselling, wait a day, send it to the backbone provider of the host.