Content Theft - How I Recently Had To Deal With That
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I recently found out some blog copied one of my post without my permission, and without any credits or link. Least I can say is I wasn’t happy about that. I was thinking about writing a post to let people know about this, with details and everything, but honestly, after reading more on the topic, and the recent “DoshDosh vs SEOposition” thing, I’m not sure it would’ve been a good idea to go and write about that on here. As it would not have be relevant, and I prefer not to go there anyway.
Instead let’s see what can be done when you find out your content has been copied without your permission. Just remember I’m not a plagiarism/copyright expert.
A post on Blog Herald about content theft (which was copied without their permission!) made me think a lot. I suggest you read that post and also check out their “20 Best Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools” post. It’s well worth it.
So, Here’s What Happened
I use Google Alerts and Copyscape already. Those are the 2 tools I use, and I’m happy with the results so far.
I received a Google Alert e-mail, scanned through the links, and clicked on one that looked suspicious. And there it was, my post on their blog, and no linking back to SmartWealthyRich.
Fortunately they had a contact form on their blog, so I sent them an e-mail and also kept a copy for myself and I also sent a copy to infos[their domain name].com, just to make sure. I sent them something like this:
Hi [blog owner],
My name is Jonathan, I run a blog, SmartWealthyRich, and I just found a post on your blog , [their blog URL], which was copied from SmartWealthyRich. I didn’t give you permission to republish my article on your site, and would like it to be removed from your blog as soon as possible.
If you want to quote my article, feel free to use a couple of lines and link back to my blog using proper anchor text. Something like “source: Smart Wealthy Rich” will do.
I hope to hear back from you within 48 hours, or else I will have to take further actions.
You can reach me at [phone number here] or reply to this e-mail.
Thank you,
Jonathan-C. Phillips
Then I waited for 2 days… no answer from them, and my post was still there. I searched for their domain name on Who.Is (you can also search for that info on most registrar’s website), and the name servers told me where their blog is hosted, so I contacted their hosting company… didn’t work, got no answer from them.
I wanted to bang my head on the wall !!
Contacting The Advertisers
My advice: when the thieves won’t reply, when the hosting guyz won’t reply… hit them where it hurts the most (no not there!), contact their advertisers/sponsors!
That blog had banners and text links in a “sponsored links” section. Kinda like what I have here on SWR. So I clicked those links and banners, and sent e-mails to all their advertisers, to let them know they were doing business with thieves, and explained the situation.
Guess what? In less than 24 hours I got 6 emails, 5 from the advertisers/sponsors, and 1 was from the blog owner. 3 out of the 5 advertisers told me they would stop doing business with that blog, and they sent the blog owner e-mails, asking for explanations and removal of the article. The blog owner took my article off his site right away!
I won! That put a huge smile on my face! Hit them where it hurts the most: their pockets!
Be Polite And Do Some Research
If you ever had to deal with content theft, which seems to be common in the blogosphere, especially with thousands of blogs in the same niche, here are some things/tips/advices you might find useful:
Also read those:
You can also contact your lawyer (or find one).
It s*cks big time when it happens, but it’s something all of us will have to deal with at some point. Remember to always be polite and spell check before sending those e-mails. And keep a record of everything. Oh and last thing, never write a post on your blog saying that some other blog stole your content, you need solid proof before accusing anyone of content theft.
Your Turn To Talk
So with all that said, have you ever had to deal with content theft? Someone copy-pasting your article/post without your consent and no link back? What would you consider being “fair”? Do you have a “copyright” page on your blog? If not, why?
Take care :)
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Well, that’s too bad. Hope that won’t happen again. I rarely use the Alerts you mentioned. I think I should use them from now on.
Calvin, yeah Google Alerts rock, I get e-mails everyday for “smartwealthyrich,com” and other terms, and found many websites indexing my content that didn’t appear in technorati so :)
Well handled Jon.
The great thing about thieves is that they always have a financial incentive. Hit that and you always get good results.
Shane,
totally! hit them where it hurts the most! :)
man, when that blog removed my post from there, it really was a “yeah baby” moment. success, victory! lol
Hey Jon, you really go after that content thief, don’t you?
I’ve tried copyscape once but never really thought my content will be copied. But recently, I discovered a few lines of one of my article was posted on a fellow blogger’s blog without linking back to my post.
I didn’t confront her as I believe she mean no harm, all I did was post a comment thanking her for spreading the word about my post!
Well, i guess its a less aggressive way to deal with such situation.
Glad you tracked them down and got them to comply….however (and hopefully not to start a fight here) but something betshopboy said prompted me to write.
When betshopboy said “I discovered a few lines of one of my article (sic) was posted on a fellow blogger’s blog without linking back to my post.” I want to make sure everyone understands this (because its a very common misconception: There is nothing at all illegal about that whatsoever - it is merely rude and in bad taste.
For the purposes of commentary, criticism, and scholarship (which the courts have traditionally given a lot of leeway on), anyone may quote “small portions” of another text (usually agrred to mean “several lines up to as much as a couple of paragraphs”) provided there is *attribution* - i.e. the quoter attributes the extracted text to the author.
Linking back to the author is NOT the same thing as attribution and failing to linkback is not illegal (because failing to linkback is not the same as failing to attribute).
For instance, if the quoter were to say “this comes from an article in a blog by betshopboy called ‘betshopboyblog’…” but fails to make the ‘betshopboy’ a link….well, that’s rude and not how we’d like to treat each other - - but it does satisfy the requirements of attribution.
This all may seem like I’m nitpicking….until it comes to one very important thing: If one who is a victim of this rudeness (no linkback) goes and rats out the offender to their advertisers AND it turns out that the offender WAS being rude (boo) but otherwise WAS satisfying the requirements of attribution (however unhelpfully or against the spirit of blogging), then you (the person reporting them to the advertisers) have just opened yourself up to the possibility of a giant restraint-of-trade lawsuit. Essentially, you affected the persons ability to do business by accusing them of doing something illegal, when in fact all they were doing was being rude.
Betshopboy, JimH, thanx for replying!
Like I said I’m no plagiarism or copyright expert, I just go with common sense. That blog that copied my article, copied it in full, images and everything, without linking back. Which was clearly copyright violation.
On the other hand, it happen quite often others will quote something from one of my articles/posts, that I don’t mind, I just feel it’s common sense in the blogosphere to link back to the original article. I do link back when I quote.
From what I read, JimH, you’re right, there is a big difference between attribution and linkback.
When in doubt, it’s always better to do some research, you can also probably contact Plagiarism Today or search for copyright/plagiarism/content theft/attribution on Google or Wikipedia. I would suggest you don’t contact the advertisers and the hosting company without sufficient proof. Goota make sure before accusing (or else it’ll maybe turn out like doshdosh/seoposition). If you find your words quoted on another blog with attribution, like JimH wrote, it’s rude if there’s no link back, but it’s always ok to send an e-mail to the blog owner to ask if possible to add a linkback.
That’s a good idea.
I usually don’t bother fighting people who steal my content. It takes too much time… and if they need it that much I just send Google a note letting them know not to index the dupe content.
Scot, that’s a good idea! :)
Wanna stay as far away as we can from the supplemental results. Does google respond to those e-mails?
Thanks for the info, I’ve found a site that has copied a complete article of mine with no mention of the source. Looks like a splog covered in AdSense, will wait to hear back from owner then contact Google that should do it.
Daniel, it’s been how long? maybe you can check out this page on Adsense:
http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html
hope that helps :)
Excellent article and I’m glad you hit them where hit hurt in the wallet. I had the same problem a couple of months ago and like you contacted the 2 sites. One I never heard back from and didn’t pursue. The other one wrote to me saying they had now added a link, but they still used my whole post, so I asked them to remove it which they did.
Next time I will take your lead and contact advertisers.
Hi Tara, I’m happy one of them responded to your e-mail and removed the post. In that case it’s cool, but if you get no answer, contacting the advertisers is a good strategy. just gotta make sure you’re willing to go all the way and not quit. I think we work hard enough, we shouldn’t have to deal with content theft, but unfortunately it happens.
I’m glad you didn’t go the post all the details route, because that did cause some issues for both people involved in the other incident you mentioned.
Can you let me know how Google alerts can help with this, being a non-technical person? ;)
Snoskred
Hi Snoskred,
yeah I didn’t wanted to go the “accusation” route. Seeing what happened recently, I though I’d just write a post about it and try to help others, instead of accusing anyone, anyway my post was removed and I’m happy so :)
As for Google Alerts, they’re still in beta but it seems to be working real fine. After you sign up (free), you can add urls, and keywords, and you’ll receive e-mails (daily, weekly, or as it happens) with the latest search results or topic. You choose the keywords or url or topic, and google will send you e-mails with links to those. It’s a really nice tool to spot thieves. When you receive the e-mail just browse through the links, and click on some, that’s how I found out my post was copied without my permission.
Hope it helps :)
http://www.google.com/alerts
The same thing recently happened to me. From reading the blog, it was obvious I was not the only one they had stolen content from. I clicked on contact, and got an error page. I contacted the host who never emailed me back, but within 24 hours my posts and all of the other stolen content had been removed. The only thing left was the owner’s original posts–3 of them!
Lisa, hehe, well it’s cool, you didn’t have to go through the whole process of contacting the advertisers and all, they removed the posts. But still I’d keep an eye on this blog, just to make sure :)
i used both alert and copyscape as well jon … so far people who quoted my original posts did link to me but sadly to day some of them just mentioned my name (stocktube) without proper linking … i guess it’s ok then …
but the most serious one would be one fella who used my contents and made changes to the wording as if it was his … but a read would reveal that it was copied from mine … so in such case, it’s hard to argue since the author was too lazy to use his brain-cells to write his own articles but creative enough to make such changes …
how sad …
StockTube,
that’s bad, why can’t people come up with their own ideas? What you described happened to me many times. I haven’t really found a way to deal with that yet, but I’m still looking. What I usually do is leave a comment on their post, and say something like “hey great article, reminds me of one I wrote 3 days ago, will keep an eye on your site” it happened before that the article was removed, but of course they can simply delete the comment. oh well
:)
Hi, i’ve removed you from the viral link tags. Mind to share the reason why you dont want to take part in it?
Yeah, i’ve got some one copied my post exactly the same and post in his blog as well. And all of his blog content is from other people’s posts, non write by himself. However, he did mention who are the real writer and did put a link to my blog posts.
Hi Shawn, probably most of his site is in the supplemental index in Google, would make sense. If the site is indexing content from many blogs, kinda like a news aggregator, and include links back, I think it’s fine (althought I’ll delete the trackbacks that’s for sure)
Regarding the Viraltag thing, thank you for including my blog, but I don’t wanna participate because I don’t see any value in it. A matrix of star or a little icon or a link tag, still that doesn’t have a lot of value, I wouldn’t want my blog to be linked to with a * or with hundreds of other blogs on the same page, which would then be copied to other blogs. It doesn’t help for PR, doesn’t help “that much” with technorati, and it makes people wanna go read other blogs, and I wanna build an audience and make people wanna stay, so virallinking isn’t something I wanna be a part of. But thanx anyway!
:)
I have had some posts reprinted without my permission, but a link back to my originating post has always occurred. At least I have not found any that have not given credit.
Adam, that’s good, at least they’re linking back. Still I’d encouurage people to have a “copyright” page, just to make sure :)
You definitely handled that very well. It’s amazing how people will take credit for work, thoughts, and ideas that aren’t their own.
Anthony, thanx, I didn’t wanted to go the “accusation” route, anyway my post was taken off that blog.
Makes me think about what happened to you with your wordpress theme!
good post. I like how you went after the money. Like they say, “money talks!”
So… what if they dont have banners / advertisers??
just out of curiosity…how did you find out about it in the first place.
Tyler,
it’s true, money talks, especially with thieves hehe
Yaas,
good question, I was lucky they had advertisement, banners and text-links, but if they don’t contacting the hosting company (or the hosting service, like blogger) can work. Another way would be to find the WhoIs information and send an e-mail to the registrar, or a “cease and desist” letter to the address listed on the WhoIs contact information page.
Basebal Investor,
I found it using Google Alerts, I scanned through the links in the e-mail, and clicked on 3 or 4 and one was the one I talk about in my post. Fortunately that post had “SmartWealthyRich” in the body of the post, so probably google alerts foudn that one cause of that, since they didn’t link back to here.
The same thing recently happened to me and a squatter took one of the website from Blogger after I uploaded the content to wordpress. Copied a lot of my articles. Blogger finally took it down, after so many messages to them, but you are right, I could have gone after their advertising….
Great post and discussion here ..
Sharon, contacting Blogger was the thing to do I think, and they removed it so it’s all good. With services like Blogger and others it usually works ok. It’s a little harder when the blog is hosted on a different server, and that server is not in the US for example. Laws are different from one country to another.
Terence, great discussion indeed! :)
Jon,
Thanks for the info. I’ll have to start using Google Alerts. That was a great idea to contact the advertisers. It’s good to know that they cared enough about the blog they are advertising on to take some action.
If its blatant plagiarism with exactly copied text/images, I don’t think publishing a post about it would be that bad..but I’m glad your resolved your problem easily, Jon.
A few months ago I had the same problem and I published a post calling out the blogger because I notice that he wasn’t just ripping me off but some other bloggers as well.
I still have people ripping me off on a daily basis and some of them are incredibly difficult to stop. My usual approach would be hit the web host but there are some that are hosted on Blogspot and Google doesn’t give a damn about plagiarism (trust me I’ve tried)… :)
Maki, I’m happy you took the time to leave a comment bro! :)
You bring a really really good point! If the blog is stealing content from many blogs and not just yours, I think it’s a good idea to post about it, to let people know, and also contact the other bloggers.
Contacting the hosting company may work, but like you said, some don’t care. Usually the advertisers will care about that, I would :)
That’s awesome :D I never heard of Google Alerts or Copyscape…thanks for sharing those!!
-Gregg
Thanks for this J. Never even worried about this until now.
p.s. I think you handled the situation perfectly.
Gregg, Goldy, you’re more than welcome guyz. I wouldn’t wanna see any of my buddies content on some other blog, I’m happy you find this post useful! :)
One thing you might suggest to people who are “borrowing” your content is that they consider a tool like clipmarks. Clipmarks allows you to collect a snippet from another site, document it with a back link and then have the 1000 character snip on your site. I do this on my own site and it provides me with a legit clipping with documentation that I can then use for basis of my own original commentary. As my blog is carried on some major news feeds for my industry, this gets the original author some nice publicity as well as a backlink. I also use trackbacks to make sure the original author knows whats going on.
What pisses me off sometimes is when somebody major like the Wall Street Journal links or clips your site and the only way you can SEE what they did is to subscribe. That happened to me today. Glad for the WSJ traffic, but I didnt even know about it til I looked at my site stats.
Hi Eric, thanx a bunch for sharing that. I’ve never heard of Clipmarks, but seems it’s a great tool, could be pretty useful. Only thing I’m wondering is if a copyright notice says something like “you may not copy more than 250 words” or something like that, would it still be considered “legit” to use clipmarks and have a 1000 words snip on your blog?
Hey I haven’t thought about that, if a site/blog republishes content in a members only area. Kinda have to weigh the pros and cons, if the site is linking back and is a major website or blog and it’s getting you loads of traffic, I think it’s fine, but still I’d like to know what they quoted, and the comments from people. You bring a really strong point Eric, I’ll have to do some research about that.
:)
Thanks for the awesome tips. I had never heard of copyscape before!
Unfortunately this has happened to me too many times now, except with a few of my sites, not yet on my blog. I ended wasting $400+ on my lawyer to send out some letters. The site owners made some ridiculously minor changes and the lawyer said it was enough that I couldn’t do anything else. Sometimes you just get screwed…
Hi tallfreak! You’re welcome, hope it helps!
Zac,
woah that’s bad! Sometimes the law is not on our side, but maybe having the opinion of a second lawyer would be a good idea in cases like that. Although, at some point, you don’t wanna end up broke cause of that.
Jon,
Thanks for another great article. If anyone ever copies any of my content I think I now have the tools that I need to take action.
Hi Andrew, welcome! I’m happy you found this post useful! :)
Hi Jon,
Great post - full disclosure that I work for Attributor a company that is trying to automate the various steps that you went through to do this.
In addition to providing visibility and context for all content re-use, we’re also planning to enable revenue share agreements. For example, you can define the rules of re-use, such as “Full re-use ok as long as you link back to my site and share x% of any adsense revenue you make on the page”.
If you had this option available to you, I’m curious if you or your readers would start here?
Thanks a lot for sharing this story
Hi Rich, thanx for replying, I checked out your website, there’s a lot of good infos on your blog ( http://www.attributor.com/blog/ ). I think it’s a good idea, I would consider using your services, looking forward to when you guyz launch. It sounds interesting :)
google alerts is a good way to keep track of who’s linking back to you too!
Wealth Builder, google alerts is really a nice (and quick, and easy) way to keep track of who’s linking back, but also to keep track of keywords, for example, a lot of my posts have the words “Smart Wealthy Rich” in the body, so a google alert wiith those keywords help me keep track of who’s linking back, but also who’s not linking back :)
24 hrs later and the site has been suspended, many thanks Jon :-)
ahh it didnt happened to me yet!! not that i know of anyway……. but this is great tips and that idea of the copyright page is so simple and so useful …
Daniel,
hey I’m happy you found it useful bro! :)
Confessing7Girl,
hope it doesn’t happen to you, it’s never fun having to deal with situations like this. A simple copyright page can make a huge difference :)
This is a great post, with great dialogue too.
Tell me this Jonathan, how do you feel when someone copies the whole article word for word, and then puts a link at the bottom?
Hi Armen, thanx, I’m quite happy with the response this post got :)
Well, if someone copies a whole article and puts a link back at the bottom, honestly I would e-mail the blogger and ask to either remove the article or post an excerpt (around 250 words or something). I don’t think posting the whole article, even if there a link back, will help in any way. Google’s supplemental index is not a fun place to hang at.
I wrote on my “copyright” page, that it’s fine if it’s 250 words + a link back. When I started blogging I thought it was fine if someone republished my whole article and link back to my blog, but soon came to the conclusion that it wasn’t doing any good for my blog and for theirs, so now it’s 250 words (more or less)
:)
[…] http://smartwealthyrich.com/content-theft-how-i-recently-had-to-deal-with-that/ Here is an article about content theft as it pertains to bloggers. This comes from my friend Jon over at Smart Wealthy Rich. […]
[…] Jon of SmartWealthyRich.com as always has a tremendous amount of quality posts. Especially insightful was his post about how he dealt with Content Theft. […]
Congrats on getting your content issue resolved. I am glad some advertisers still have ethics and do not want to associate themselves with bad company; and assisted you in direct contact with the other blog owner to get the copied content removed.
Hi Billy, I’m happy too! At least 3 out of the 5 advertisers contacted the blog owner, which I was really surprised they did, but I guess since they are “smaller” advertisers, and not huge companies like Google Adsense or something that probably helped :)
[…] Content Theft and How I Recently Had to Deal with That from Smart Wealthy Rich […]
That’s great that you were able to get it resolved. I am also impressed that the advertisers took a principled stand and stopped doing business with the blog-stealer. It’s refreshing to see principles win out over money once in a while.
Hello Emily, it is indeed refreshing! It’ll be up to them to keep doing business with the blog that copied my content, but at least now they know. I wouldn’t advertise on a blog that steals content that’s for sure, so I’m happy the advertisers took the time to do something :)
Hey Jonathan, this is an awesome way of getting attention from the content stealers. I’ve read Maki’s post on a similar issue but I believe your tactic really gets the result. Btw, I use copyscape too.
Copyscape rocks! :)
I followed the whole doshdosh vs seoposition thing. Was something.
When I found out that blog copied my content and all, I thought of writing an in depth post about it, especially cause the blog owner wasn’t returning my e-mail, but I thought it would be better to just write a more useful article, and not point fingers :)
Hmm.. i see.. so the viral links aren’t really helping that much.. well.. thanks for advice.. thanks a million.. Great Going
Hi Shawn, no prob, although this is only my own opinion, from what I read, and heard from other bloggers and from my own experience, it’s not really useful
I have had to deal with content theft quite a bit. I’ve developed my own system for dealing with it which is similar to the approach you took: http://www.explodethenet.com/a-6-step-system-to-stop-people-from-stealing-your-website-content-10.html
I had not thought of contacting their advertisers, though - that’s a good approach. I will keep that in mind should I even need another arrow in my quiver!
Thanks,
Adam
Adam, that’s a really good post on your blog. Contacting the hosting company and sending a dmca letter to the hosting company usually works pretty good, unless they’re not in the same country and don’t “have” to follow the same laws. But if the server is located in the US (or in your country, in my case, Canada) it usually works, and they quite fast at replying :)
[…] to the situation that I didn’t cover. Check out the full Jonathan’s full post here for more details on the […]
I learned about this post today, and took the liberty of linking to it in a post of my own.
Thanks for sharing your experience - and particularly for listing and linking to those resources.
I came to this page to learn a bit more because 2 of my content was copied! the content was changed a bit but the links, referral links, and my affiliate blog links are within their post (you would think they would adjust them)
I will be reading post about copywriting and protection all day today!
[…] from Smart Wealthy Rich had this same issue happen to him as well: It s*cks big time when it happens, but it’s something […]
hey done a great job. how dare they can do like this with out your permision.. dont they felt guilty doing so.. anyway you do your research to avoid content theft.. google alert is wonderful in identifying theft… great yar..
Without owners permission nobody should take the content of a page to their blog site. I really feel pity on that person who has done it. It was a great idea to fight back. You will succeed because the truth never fails.