I no sooner had set up my new blog on WordPress than someone in the Czech Republic stole two of my landscape articles.
I frequently run CopyScape to check for such plagiarism, as it’s a major problem for bloggers.A check of this person’s blog shows that many other blogger’s material has been stolen as well.
Why would someone do this? Well, lots of people set up these dummy blogs solely to earn income from Google by having Google Ads on the site. Since they don’t want to bother with writing their own material, they cut & paste (steal) the hard work of others. They’re the same kind of lowlife that scammers are.
Sometimes the thieves are unethical competitors who use the material to redirect potential clients away from an ethical, legitimate company.
The person who stole my material is using a WordPress blog, so I contacted the WordPress folks for help in removing my material. They wouldn’t do anything.
I also went through the process of contacting Google since what the thief is doing violates Google’s Terms of Service for their AdSense program. There are certain steps one must take to register a formal complaint per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). I took those steps and the case is currently “under review”.
In the meantime, the thief has stolen a third article – complete with the copyright verbiage that I now use at the bottom of each article. They are targeting the articles that I’ve written using the tag word ‘landscape’. So I’ve changed my ‘landscape’ posts to remove that as a tag – except this one. I’ll see if it makes its way to their site as well.
Read these previous posts on Google plagiarism for more info:
Copyright © 2007. Reproduction of any portion of this blog post or the images is prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If this post is being viewed on any site other than www.ReesesPiecesOfRealEstate.com then the material has been stolen without permission. Violators will be reported.
Several points/questions.
First, have you considered filing a DMCA notice with the host of the site? WordPress can not do anything unless they host the site (may WordPress sites are actually hosted elsewhere) and you send a full DMCA notice to them. Information on doing that can be found at automattic.com
Second, I’ve done tests on Copyscape and found it to be pretty much useless right now in detecting content theft. Since you’re a WordPress.com user you can’t take advantage of some of the great plugins, but you may want to consider using FeedBurner as it provides some good RSS scraping detection. You can use both if you wish.
Finally, please let me know if they do steal this article. I see a lot of spam blog scraping the RSS feed based on keywords and tags. It wouldn’t be a surprise to me to see that happen here.
If there is anything that I can do to help, please let me know!
Jonathan, thanks for your input. I’ll email you off-post with extra info.
As a member of Active Rain, plagiarism is always a hot topic. One of the members just mentioned another site for checking for stolen content. He said it’s slower than CopyScape but more thorough. It’s http://www.articlechecker.com.
I’d stay tuned, there are a lot of companies entering this area and I’d wait and see what they can do. Right now, Digital Fingerprints in conjunction with Google Alerts seems to be your best bet.
Help is on the way though.
I received your email. Yes, I did do the proper DMCA formal fax and have received an email from Google saying they are “working on it”.
Thanks for your other tips as well.
The same thing has happened to me. I’ve contacted Google, but I don’t think they can do anything, except remove the AdSense. What should be my first step. Not only is my content being stolen, the copied stuff is showing up much higher in search results! I’m losing it.
The reason these people steal our stuff is to get exactly what you are experiencing – better Google Juice which translates to a greater opportunity to have more hits to their Google Ads and to earn more money.
Click on Jonathan’s name above which will take you to PlagiarismToday web site. There’s a ton of helpful info there. That’s where I went.
You’ll have to formally submit the DMCA report. Google will check it out and if the splogger is deemed to have stolen the material, Google will send the site’s name to ChillingEffects.
Don’t expect Google to remove the site, however. They’re not good at doing that.