I published some Photoshop tutorial videos on a content aggregator site, eHow, and the copyrights are mine. The site offers an embed code so others can host the video with a link to the original. My videos were stolen by several sites in another country, and they claimed them as their own. This hurt traffic and revenue to my videos. My requests to them to delete my content were ignored. I deleted my videos from the source, but they still play on the sites that stole them. Will they stop playing after a day or after the original server refreshes or something? (Obviously I don't know how this works.) Is there a better way to handle this in the future? Thanks.
Are you sure the videos aren't just playing from your cache? If not.. if the files are actually hosted at eHow, they may have simply removed your article, but kept the video files on the server. In the future, maybe try YouTube - you can tick the "No, external sites may NOT embed and play this video" box. This won't stop people download the YouTube video and hosting it themselves though.
Thanks, @Kerosene. I cleared my cache, but maybe it will disappear from the site that stole it in a day or so if it is still on the eHow server, and if that is how it works with embedded videos. I will keep checking. I did not not know that you could disallow embedding on YouTube. This should reduce the frequency of stealing. A few thefts don't hurt my income that much, but this particular video had 109 listings, only a few of which were legit eHow links. Many of the other sites kept the link to my original video and only published an excerpt of the article that was with it, which is cool, but so many outright thefts make my content look duplicated and draw views away from my original video, reducing the money I make on it.
Looks like they have done the old download and host to you. People have the ability to download the videos that are on a page, edit them through their video software editor and then reuse the video, it happens all the time with those added on youtube.com etc. Maybe next time, keep a logo of you site in the background of the video area rather than adding a watermark.