Hey, sometimes just asking nicely or playing a few pranks isn’t going to be enough to get someone to stop trying to make easy money off your efforts. That’s cool, we can start to get outsiders involved to settle it if things go on this long.
Its the Index, Right?
The biggest problem with someone taking your content is that they might be able to use it to outrank you in the search index. Enough backlinks to their stolen version and they might create enough confusion for the index to just forget about either copy.
Well, just set the record straight.
- Google has a simple process of accepting DMCA claims that you can read about over here.
- Yahoo explains their DMCA policy here.
- Microsoft is largely responsible for the DMCA law, so they obviously take it seriously as well.
When you make a DMCA report, the other party will have a chance to make a counter-notification if they really want to drag things out in to court. So by this point in time, its good to not only be certain of malicious intent, but you’ll also want to have some proof you can convince a judge and jury with. Also, be sure to exhaust your other options because this one can end up costing you time and money even if you do win.
Of course, the benefit of filing a DMCA with Google like this is that you can get the scraper’s site removed from the index outright. Not only will it help you and other other bloggers & authors who are being ripped off, but it will help future users find the quality sites that they’re really after. The internet would probably be a better place if the entire link profiles of scraper sites were completely knocked out of the index…
In the next step, we’ll apply the DMCA to advertising in much the same way it is used for removing sites from the search index. Hey, maybe they aren’t outranking you anymore, but does that mean you want them to make money off your work and other peoples’ as well?
Nah, there’s only so much advertising money to go around! If we’re at this point, we might as well keep fighting back for every inch we can take.
Leave a Reply