Continued from Part 1

Deterrents

‘Scrapers’ (the term used to describe those who mindlessly copy content) almost always know what they are doing and that it is illegal and immoral. Many are not diehard criminals, rather they are teenagers trying to make beer money online or a desperate business man rushing to the internet without consultation. These types of people can be put off in a couple of ways:

Terms and Conditions – Some frank and strong minded opinions regarding your published work and the actions you take against infringers of your copyright will help to show you are serious.

© Copyright Notice – Although in most developed countries copyright is implied as the original publisher of work. The © acts as visual reminder and also clearly shows the publishers intent to stake his claim over their work. Further more, by adding the date the content was created you are establishing a historical record of ownership.

Copyscape

Copyscape.com crawls the internet much in the same way as Search Engines do to find as many websites as they can and record them in vast data centres. Website owners can then user the Copyscape service to search for records of their content to identify if it appears anywhere else on the web.

Website publishers can also manually add their content to Copyscape and place a working notice on their website ‘Protected by Copyscape’ to deter would be thieves.

Copyscape also serves as a useful tool to ensure that article writers are not supplying you with copied articles for your site. Many of the article writers available for ridiculous rates of £10 per 500 word article simply copy the content and reword it.

Google Search

By searching Google for your content you are able to scan up to 8 Billion websites within seconds. This provides the same time saving advantages as searching Copyscape and is another tool in your arsenal against Scrapers. Simply copy a passage from your site into the Google search box and submit a search. Hopefully only your site will appear as a result meaning that text has not been scraped.

Way Back Machine

Way Back Machine (otherwise known as Internet Archive) crawls the web in the same way Copyscape and the Search Engines do, archiving pages in their data centres. Way Back Machine allows website owners to search for old versions of their site and prove in what month of what year content/designs were added to their site.

Way Back Machine is also a fun thing to play with to see what your favourite website and large organisations sites looked like 5 years ago. Perhaps I’m showing the geek side of me now… well, I’m a Chic Geek.

Cease and Desist Letters

When you find a site infringing your copyright, your first course of action should usually be to send a Cease and Desist Letter. This polite but firm letter should describe the nature and location of the infringement and where the original publication can be found. The letter should also include a demand for the infringer to cease and desist. Explaining that if they do not cease and desist you will pursue all avenues available to you including legal action. It is best only to threaten action you intend to pursue.

Most Scrapers will quickly remove the content from their site and respond with an apology. For those that don’t, you have the bellow options available to you.

Report infringing pages to ISP

It is possible to find the contact details of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) for the website that is infringing your copyright. To do this you have to perform a ‘Who Is’ lookup using a service such as the one found at www.networksolutions.com. Simply type the domain name of the offending site in to the search box and Network Solutions will provide the contact details of the site owner (if available) and the ISP of the domain.

By notifying the ISP that one of their customers is infringing copyright the ISP is obligated to remove the offending pages from their service. You will have to supply details of the infringements and substantiate your claims with proof. If you have followed the steps above you should have no problem proving the content is your own.

DMCA Report to Google

Filing a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) report to Google will ensure that your claim is reviewed and if found to be valid can result in the offending sites pages being removed from Google search result pages.

DMCA is a law passed under US federal law and the UK looks as though it is to get its own version. I’m not a solicitor and have no intention of understanding the differences between US and UK law. What I do understand is that a UK site owner can report copyright infringement to Google under the DMCA.

To do this you need to follow the instructions found here: http://www.google.co.uk/dmca.html