Fighting Scrapers Pt 4: DMCA and Advertisers

So you asked nicely, you even tried to feed them poisoned content.  But you still couldn’t get the scrapers to stop stealing or take down your original blog posts and articles?  Maybe you even got them knocked out of the major search engine indexes, but it looks like they’re still making money from your work!  Well, then you can try to hit them in the wallet next.

Adsense DMCA

Adsense is a popular advertising method because its quick, it pays out competitively, and you can rely on Google to stay in business long enough to send the money they owe you.  Since its easy to scale to sites of any size and as many topics as you want to publish, it is a favorite of scrapers who would rather automate everything than focus niche sites on particular products or affiliate programs.

Luckily, shutting down the revenue stream of a scraper site is no problem at all with Google’s Adsense DMCA.

Now, Google doesn’t want to be complicit in copyright infringement, and if they’re paying to advertise on stolen content they could get caught up in the whole mess financially.  So if you find something that’s yours in the Adsense program, they want to know about it.

That doesn’t mean you should go around using this indiscriminately to shut down competition!  Any claims you make better be solid:

Please note that you will be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys’ fees) if you materially misrepresent that a product or activity is infringing your copyrights. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether certain material of yours is protected by copyright laws, we suggest that you first contact an attorney.

These laws are here to protect the rights of content creators (supposedely), but that doesn’t mean the law tolerates frivolous or false accusations!

Find their Advertisers

Not all advertisers are as ready to comply and make the DMCA process as easy as Google is.  If the site isn’t using Adsense, your next step would be to decipher exactly what kind of ads they are using.  You’ll probably have to search into the source code and even hop around the web a bit, but once you find the source of their affiliate or click-through programs you can either find their own DMCA process or something in their terms that can be used to sever the relationship to your scraping nemesis.

There are probably even some advertisers who really don’t care what laws your country says their breaking – but even if that’s the case there may still be one way you can fight back…  One more post about the topic is coming up next.

1 Trackback / Pingback

  1. Escalating Against Blog Scrapers

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*