Copyright | Site Scraping & Content Theft
Criminals are Stealing Your Words: Stop Letting Them!
Bookmark this story, and stop letting thieves profit more from your writing than you do
Scrapers, article spinners, and willful plagiarists are the sworn enemies of all serious writers. Yes, sometimes the fight feels futile and time-wasting; it is tempting to simply let it go.
There is some wisdom in that — by ignoring them, they may well fall into an abyss of anonymity and disappear into the sucking black hole of abandoned websites, while giving them more visits (in order to determine what’s been stolen from us) may encourage them to keep doing it.
It’s the principle of the thing. And eventually, repeat infringers get themselves placed on a number of blacklists that will make it increasingly difficult to find a web hosting company willing to touch them with a ten foot pole. Because when you put their web hosting company on alert, you technically make them a willful infringer, and a potential defendant in a suit for copyright infringement, as well, if they fail to act.
What Can We Do?
First, stop feeling “flattered.” You’re not helping yourself, and you’re not helping other writers. People aren’t stealing your words because they love them; they are stealing them because content has commercial value to them, and they are too lazy or too lacking in talent to create it for themselves.
Second, gather some information. Record the title and URL where you found the stolen work.
If it is not yours, find and notify the original author, send them a link to this story, then STOP. You are done.
You cannot file a DMCA “take-down” notice unless you can accurately, lawfully assert ownership of the material. Why? Imagine that I have posted a poem to Medium. I still retain copyright and the right to sell or license my own poem to any publication elsewhere that will take it (despite its having been “previously published”). Now, imagine that an online poetry journal publishes my poem, and you recognize it from Medium. Had I not licensed the poem to the poetry journal, it would be a copyright violation even if I am credited as the author. But if I have licensed the work…
