Comments on: Don’t Steal My Content!

By: Vili Maunula

Vili Maunula — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 11:22:13 +0000

egon — Have you made sure that in addition to framing your website, they are not tinkering with your Adsense ads (if you run any)? I think that there are cases where they frame your site and change all the advertising point to their IDs, practically making money off your site.

I would also be a bit concerned about the possibility of the framed sites counting as double content for Google, and thus hurting your search engine rankings. But I don’t know how Google handles iFrames.

By: Vili Maunula

Vili Maunula — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 11:19:29 +0000

I’m painfully familiar with content theft. Even if you only maintain your websites as a recreational hobby, it hurts when someone just goes an copy-pastes an article or two. I have never really had much luck with contacting web hosts — they either ignore you or send a message back that they can’t really do much about it.

However, if the person stealing your content runs Adsense or other ads, one of the things that I have found to be the quickest way to deal with these things is to send a formal notice to the webmaster indicating that if the content is not immediately removed, you will submit a DMCA copyright notice to Google.

So far, all webmasters have rather removed the item than risked losing their Adsense subscription and possibly be removed from Google’s index. (Neither of these are really that probable, and going through the DMCA process is not exactly easy for an individual blogger, but it is usually enough to scare them.)

By: mEsoL

mEsoL — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:58:28 +0000

Well Mitch, I already ask your permisssion if I can get your FirefoxFacts content to be translated to my own language before. I hope, I not the own that you point a finger at.

By: clickfire

clickfire — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:37:26 +0000

Yeah, this has got to be one of the most annoying things, especially for a writer who tries to take some pride in his work. I am amazed at the people who think they are actually doing a good work by republishing an article without asking. Some people just don’t see intellectual property as property, it seems.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:29:56 +0000

Well in that case, it might be a little sticky. That might not be worth going after since it is still your Web site that people are seeing. I do believe though that there are (at least for WordPress) plugins that prevent your content from being loaded in an iframe.

By: egon

egon — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:30:40 +0000

I haven’t really had people blatantly steal my content, but I have had quite a bit of directly mirroring one of my articles in their frame. So it was my site, with a frame around it. I was upset at first, then a little confused, trying to decide if I should be upset. I mean, they were bringing me traffic and revenue, and it’s really not that different then coming to my site from an other link. They weren’t using my content as their own, because it was still my site. What would you do?