The only thing more frustrating that searching for a plagiarist is finding one — PT
This post was written in support of Digital FingerPrint, a plugin for WordPress
Sooner or later, popular or not, your blog content (words, ideas, and images) will get stolen. After the shock wears off, a subtle feeling of pride might come over you — don’t feel flattered. Whoever it was that took your work, probably did so because they thought you wouldn’t notice and more importantly, it was easily available allowing them to profit with minimal effort.
Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today has written extensively on the subject of content theft and plagiarism. His insight and thoughts on the matter are top notch and I strongly recommend you start reading at his site should you discover your content has been stolen (Plagiarism Today is also a great resource to look to in order to prevent content theft and plagiarism). Plagiarism Today recommends the following course of action when dealing with plagiarism (see Plagiarism Today for the expanded version).:
- Contact the infringing author / website yourself first. Use a Cease and Desist if talking doesn’t work.
- If that doesn’t produce results, contact the host and use the DMCA (if the offender is in the US) to your advantage. Get them removed from search engine indexes
- If none of the above works, your best course of action might be to ‘name and shame’ and bring publicity to the whole situation
- Sometimes, there is is nothing you really can do.
MaxPower believes that unless the theft was done out of ignorance, you should attack the theif’s income stream. After all, a content thief steals in order to profit.
One common way content thieves profit is by placing contextual ads within your stolen work. Google’s Adsense program as well as Yahoo’s Publisher Network both explicitly state that users of their contextual advertising system cannot place ads on pages where the content has been stolen.
Therefore, the theory goes that if you cut off the revenue stream for these content thieves than they no longer have any reason to continue to steal from you — it isn’t profitable. Google (Stopping Adsense Splogs & Spammers: Methods that Work) and Yahoo (YPN! Launches Feedback Mechanism) provide an easy method of alerting them to abuse by websites using their ads.
MaxPower is constantly researching methods of alerting other CPC and advertising companies to member websites that break their terms of service. Sadly, most companies appear to hide methods of public input on member websites or simply offer no way to report cheaters at all. It probably costs to much to process complaints. The flip side of this is that by doing nothing, companies wishing to advertise will realise that spending any money on web based advertising is meaningless due to the number of hucksters and shills out there. It is a myopic stance.
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25 Sep 06
8:54 pm
[...] Social Bookmarking « What should you do when you’ve found a content thief? [...]
28 Sep 06
8:10 pm
This is an excellent and very timely post.
I know of many people on deviantART.com that are going through quite a bit of art theft,
and recently, I discovered a site that was not only stealing my content, but they had it in frames which directly uses my site’s content.
It’s my bandwidth, my hard work, my content. I give everything away for free so it p’s me off even more.
What the dumb asses don’t realize is that we as webmasters have Access Logs that show all of the information that we want to about who visits our sites.
Thanks for the post.
I’ll pass it on.
Ken Saunders
10 Oct 06
10:52 am
Thank you. Much.
12 Oct 06
12:15 am
[...] So here is what I’m going to do, follow my own advice except I’m also going to experiment with the AntiLeech Plugin and Fighting Dirty, and maybe my own htaccess tricks. [...]
12 Oct 06
11:20 pm
I am concerned about image theft as a photographer, and a visual artist. Does this finger print work on images?
Also, would it be rude, or have legal implications, if I were to ask “who” is the bottom feeder that is stealing your content and bandwidth?
We should start a blacklist to try to stop them. : )
26 Oct 06
10:30 pm
This is a very good post, with some excellent advice. I just had somebody copy content from my website today and they removed it immediately upon request. I take it seriously, but yet you must recognize that Matt Cutts explained how there is no such thing as a duplicate content “penalty.”
03 Nov 06
3:22 am
[...] As I wrote previously, there are a lot of ways to stop content theft and plagiarism. My personal favourite thing to do is to go after a plagiarists source of money. If you stop them earning then they cannot profit from their shady activities. [...]
07 Dec 06
6:05 pm
[...] ETA: I found a good link providing advice for fighting Splogs and am reporting this one to Google. [...]
03 Mar 07
4:51 am
Excellent content site, thank you for the information. It has helped me a lot.
I have a few sites that are stealing my content but there are no ads and NO contact details on their sites. How do I actually contact them or report them? I am using Wordpress with Anti-leech and the Digital Fingerprints plugins but they don’t seem to be helping.
14 Mar 07
5:40 am
I have a public content thief list that I have started on my website. There are still many to be added but it is a good start. Check it here and make sure if you do something similar then you remove the chance that these sites will be clicked to. This is soley for webmaster use to make sure you are not in their content. http://www.asylum-et.com/2007/03/02/content-theft/
Blumoon asked if this fingerprint works on images. The answer is no it does not but there are surely methods that work just fine. If you are a photographer I am sure you have photoshop. You can make a watermark image and have it as big or small and as visible or transparent as you wish.
09 Mar 08
10:52 pm
Excellent article. Bookmarked your page. Keep up the good work. JM
02 Jul 08
7:36 am
[...] In case u find any site which is extracting ur full rss feed then u can take actions against that site. Here is a nice article about it :What should you do when you’ve found a content thief? [...]
05 Aug 08
8:36 pm
[...] Looking around I started searching for options. I found a posting on MaxPower. [...]
12 Sep 09
5:49 am
[...] What should you do when you’ve found a content thief? [...]