Taking action when someone has copied your blog without permission

This article is about the steps you can take when someone has made an unauthorized copy of something that is published on your blog.

Finding out that your blog has been copied

Previously, I've described how copyright applies to blogs in very general terms, and the steps you can take to apply copyright protection to your blog.

Even if you follow these these steps, if you put material onto the internet it is quite likely that someone will copy it.

This maybe done out of naivety, or as a deliberate attempt to rip you off, or as part of an organised spam-blogging ("splogging") operation.

There are several way you might find out that someone has copied your work:

• You, or your friends, notice it
  Maybe you or one of you readers searched for a certain phrase and you found your content elsewhere.  Or maybe you found a link to an identical post on a help-forum or discussion board.  If you use a lot of in-post linking (ie you link to another article in your content), and notice you are getting a lot of visits from somewhere unusual, then you might visit that site and find your post copied word-for-word, including the unchanged links.

• Google's spam bots notice it:  
  If you get an email or a notice saying that your blog has been identified as potential spam, then one of the possibilities is that a real spammer has chosen your content.

If you found out that someone has copied you work because Google's spam-bots detected the problem, then you simply need to follow the instructions in the email that Google sent you, or consult the Blogger Help Forums.  In short, you will be advised about a four step process that you need to follow.   This is tedious, but the nice part is that Google is dealing with the copy-cat for you, and (if you're not a spammer) you'll get your blog back.

If you find out some other way, then you need to decide what do to about the problem (if indeed you believe is is a problem).   This is closely linked to what you want to achieve - this could be any of:

• Do nothing - if you don't mind being copied, and you're willing to risk being incorrectly identified as a spammer
• Getting the copied work taken down
• Leaving the copy in place, with your name or URL  added beside it
• Being paid compensation
• Receiving a public apology

and I'm sure there are other possible remedies, too.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you can plan what steps you need to take, based on the notes in the next section.

Reality check:  There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and wanting to receive $10M compensation.  But  unless you can afford really good lawyers, it might be a good idea to have a backup plan which involves a realistic goal too, eg having your name added to the copyright materials, or having them taken down.

Steps for resolving copyright problems

Start the easy way

Unless you're certain that the copying was deliberate and malicious, the first step is most cases is to send a nice email to the person who made the copy, telling them that it's yours and what you want done about it.  (You might need to just leave a comment on their blog, if no email address is provided.)

Report them to their internet service provider

The obvious first step if politeness doesn't work is to complain to their web-host:

• If they use Blogger (ie their URL is WHATEVER.blogspot.com, or they have a custom domain but the source-code on their site looks like Blogger code),
  then you should contact Google through this page:   http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html 
  Google have a very thorough process for dealing with claims of content stealing - and if the other site that you say has stolen your work is also published in Blogger, they can look at the dates in their database to see who actually published it first.
  Make sure that you read all the details of Blogger's policies before you submit a complaint:  they don't like malicious complaints, and you could be fined quite heavily if you claim that you own something which you don't really own.

• If the person who has copied your work isn't using Blogger, you may need to do some detective work with whois (use Google-search it to find a whois service for the domain you're looking for) to see   who the host is, and what process this host uses to resolve copy-right complaints. 
  This could be particularly difficult to do if they're not located in the same country that you are (so their laws will be different), or if they use a different language.

• If the person who has copied your work has put it into YouTube, you can use information and tools on  YouTube's opyright page.

Complain to other services

If the other party's web-service-provider can't or won't help, then you could try reporting them to other services that the use.

For instance many websites are also on Facebook:  if the contents includes your material, or links to a website that's distributing your copyright material, you may be able to use Facebook's intellectual property violation reporting process.  (I haven't tried it myself, but have been told that this can be particularly effective.)

If they show advertising on their site, then complaining to either the advertisers, or to the company that organises the advertising programme, may be effective.  AdSense is quite sensitive to not having it's ads shown along with copyright violations, and provides a policy violation reporting form that you can let them know about the problem.

Charge them

Some people have had success from sending the offender a bill for use of your work.  This takes a bit of thought:  if they pay the invoice, then legally you may have licensed them to use your work for far less than it is worth.   On the other hand, if the amount that you ask them for is ridiculously high, they will probably just laugh and ignore you.

Threaten legal action

This can be fun:  write a very formal-sounding letter demanding that they cease-and-desist from using your work (name it very specifically) by a certain date, and advising that failure to do so may incur penalties including but not limited to commencement of legal proceedings for in which you will be looking for legal expenses as well as damaged incurred.  

If you would actually be willing to sue the person (see the section below), then consult a lawyer, and get them to send the letter.   But if there's no chance that you actually will sue  (and most bloggers simply don't have the time, resources or levels of proof to do so), just make the letter sound good.   If necessary, get a friend who can write pompous-sounding letters to draft it for you.    Send it by regular mail - emails are too easily ignored - and make it look official.

Finding the address to send a letter to can be a challenge - one option is to scour your copy-cat's work, and see if you can find their company or personal details on LinkedIn (most are smart enough to hide themselves on Facebook).    And if you can, then complaining to their boss may be an option, too, depending on your niche and whether their action might be harming their company's reputation.

Legal action

If all else fails, another option is to sue the person or organisation that copied your work.  If you or the copy-cat are in the USA, then the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides an approach for this.   But if you and they are in different countries, then different laws and processes may apply.  But no matter where you are, two things are likely:

• You will need to hire a lawyer - so it may be expensive and take a lot of time, and

• You may need to prove that you really did create the work, and when it was made.   

The second point is where copyright registration services come in to play:  they provide evidence that you really had created the work as at a certain date.  Unfortunately this is one of the ironies of copyright:  listing your material with a copyright service does nothing to stop anyone using it.  But if you don't list it shortly after it's created, you probably won't have any evidence if you ever get to the point of wanting to sue (or even formally complain about) someone who has copied your work.

There are some other issues with copyright services too:

• It can be difficult to list a blog, which by its nature has different material being loaded very frequently.
• You won't necessarily know which services(s) to register with - because you don't know where someone who copies your work is located, so you won't know what services a court in your country will accept evidence from.

So, while I'm not advising you to avoid the registration services altogether, it's important carefully to choose when and how to use them.

Peer pressure / Name-and-shame

If the legal approach doesn't work, or would be too expensive, then another option is to use social pressure to convince your copy-cat that they need to stop copying your work etc.  This can take a range of formats - eg, if a local small business has copied your photograph and isn't willing to compensate you, you might get all your friends to contact the business and threaten not to buy there again.   Or you might start a Facebook campaign, or put a video on YouTube telling your side of a story.   Whatever you do, make sure you that you:

• Really know what you want to achieve:  fame, a pay-off to stop the campaign etc
• Consider the risks (ie what could go wrong) and whether they're worth it
• Don't break the law yourself (it's not worth it, especially if you're the small guy), and
• Think strategically about what you might do, and how this could affect the relationships in your area or niche:  some people are just too much trouble to have an enemies.

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DISCLAIMER

This article contains general advice about the copyright issues faced by people who use Blogger.   It cannot cover every possible case or specific legal systems. 

If you need legal advice about a particular situation, consult a lawyer, ideally one who is familiar with copyright law in your country.

I do not, under any circumstances, suggest using illegal approaches - threats of violence, sabotage, etc.

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Related Articles

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers, an Introduction

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting 3rd party HTML (eg a Creative Commons licence) into your Blog

Removing the Attribution Gadget from your Blog

How to Automatically Remove Spam links From Blogger/Blogspot Comments

Spam on The internet has became very popular as many websites and blogs have a comment box in which spamers have found as a big opportunity in which they can share spam links in the hope that their websites and blogs will get to rank very much better on the internet which I would say it does not work on Blogger because any of the comment links submitted to blogger are mostly no follow, this is not my setting but Google itself.

Spam is  everywhere just as fraud is, having a huge website is quite a problem when you don't have a proper spam management for your blog as most readers get to post spam links or any un-authorised links which may affect the image of your blog to the eyes of the loyal readers.

In August 2010 Blogger introduced an automatic spam detection which allowed blogs to automatically remove comment links from the comment box which is probably good news for any professional Blogger who is having a problem with fighting spam on Blogger. In this post I will show you both ways to fight comment spamming which is either through the normal blogger comment management and also by using some simple html codes within the Template source code, both of these ways are going to control the type of comments appearing on your blog whereby most linky comments will be reverted to draft or will have to get moderated before they can appear on the blog.

Remove Spam Comments Using Blogger Spam Filter

This the one that I currently use to filter spam comments published by some of the blog readers and also by the Google bot to help control the spam comments automatically.
Using the normal Blogger Spam Filter will reduce any available spam activity on your blog by not publishing spam comments, the spam filter is not very smart as you are but it will learn from the decisions that your make as a blogger

Please Note : The Tips below will Automatically Delete/Hide all links in Blogger Comments

Remove Spam Comment links Using jQuery codes

Removing spam links in Blogger using jQuery is the best option that I will recommend for any blogger as it will not only hide the link but it will also remove it from the blog within seconds after the comment was published.

STEP 1 : Go to Blogger dashboard and select Template>>>Edit Html to open your your Template Code

STEP 2 : Press the "CTRL" + "F" keys and search for this code <body> , Just below It paste the code below.

<!--Stop Blog Comments -->
< script>$('.comment-content a[rel $=nofollow]').replaceWith(function()
{return ($(this).text());}); </script> <!--Stop Blog Comments -->

STEP 3 : Save your template and check your blog comment box if it worked properly.

Use CSS to Remove Spam Blog Comment links

Using CSS to handle spam links is not really effective as it will not remove the spam links instead it will hide them from showing on your blog but the bad thing about the use of CSS is that it will not remove the comment spam links.

Step 1 : On your Blog Dashboard, Go to Template and select Edit HTML.

Step 2 : Search for this code  ]]></b:skin> and just above it paste the code below.

.comment-content a {
display: none;
}

Step 3 : Save your Template and you will be done that easily.


Conclusion

In the options that I have shared in this post I will recommend that you add them all to your blog or just add the JQuery trick instead of using all because it works very well even without using all of the available options .

Suppose you got any questions regarding this topic please feel free to submit them on the comments box below, if your codes worked well please tell us how the spam comments were removed from your blog and we will get back to you soon.

Protect Your Website Content with DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)

Content Theft has been one of the biggest problems on Blogger and Wordpress whereby some lazy websites steal content from the other sites. Writing quality website content is not very easy at all as it might require a lot of sources and accuracy of information  but out of all the hard work that you may put into your Website content, anybody on internet can simply copy your hard work into their own website in a matter of seconds which is very bad and stopping or finding that person is not an easy thing because you don't have anything to use against them.

The internet is big with billions of sites with content  that are providing original content to the readers but it happens at some time the content might be stolen by any other website, on the internet because content theft happens daily on the internet and it has been noted that thousands of Websites on USA get ripped of their own content by professional internet thieves who can easily claim the ownership of your site content before you do, Because any content you post on the internet is not yours until your copyright it and then it will be considered your content.

Content theft will not only take the possession of your content but it can also decrease the rank of your site because of the increase of web page duplicates. Google has it own way of displaying a duplicate page which is by making the first page to get indexed as the original and all the other duplicates will be put under that page which mean they will not rank but the page which was indexed first will be the page to appear on the search results. For Example it might happen happen that you publish a post and a content thief will copy your post to his/her Website and then will get it indexed to Google before your site was indexed which will make you to be considered a thief. I have been using DMCA in the couple of months and every content that I publish is copyrighted right after pressing the publish button which will prevent internet thieves from claiming my content on Google, Bing, and all the other Search Engines.

It doesn't just end by claiming your content but DMCA will send a notice to the content thief to remove the stolen content and if the the content thief fails to remove the stolen content then DMCA will be forced to send a Take-Down Notice which will enable it to remove that page from the internet and if the content thief tries to persist then the thief will be forced to face the law.

If you might be looking forward to protecting your website content  from professional internet thieves then I will recommend to you the worlds number one free content protection service DMCA which was started by the US government to stop content theft.


If you you might have any questions towards this post please feel free to leave them on the comment box and we will like to help you, join DMCA at no cost and get your content protected .

How to find free pictures for your blog, using Creative-Commons search

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license.

What is Creative Commons

Previously I've described how copyright applies to bloggers, how you can protect your blog-content from copyright theives, and what you can do if they take you work anyway.

The focus in that series was looking after your own rights.

But rights always come with responsibilities. The details vary by country, but in general you cannot just copy other people's recent work without their permission - in the same way that they cannot copy yours.

Some people, though, are happy to give other people permission to use their work, often with certain conditions (eg you must including an attribution link to the creator).

Creative Commons is an easy, legal way for creators to give permission for things they create to be used by other people. It is a framework which offers "licenses" that creators (writers, artists, composers, poets, etc) can apply to their work to say that other people can make copies, and what conditions apply  (eg non-commercial use, only if you attribute me, etc)

To use it, authors, artists, etc don't need to register their work. Instead, they go to the Creative Commons website and get code / text to put with their published work to show what rules apply.

Then they can publish or upload their pictures, writing etc anywhere they want, and by linking to the licence the work is as protected as anything on the internet can be.

How to find pictures & music that are Creative Commons licensed

Creative Commons have a very useful search tool, found at http://search.creativecommons.org

This is not a search engine. Instead it is a front-end-tool that lets you choose:

• The keywords you want to search for (the search words)
• The type of license that you need (use for commercial purposes - yes or no, modify, adapt, build upon - yes/no)
• Which of the file host/search services to use (eg flickr, Google, Open clip art library - etc)

Once you have entered the search options, click on the source that you want to look in, and you are  taken to that site and shown the results of the search-query and options you entered.

For example, when I entered:

• "Christmas"
• Commercial allowed (because I wanted to make a picture to use in Blogger-HAT, where I have advertising)
• Changes allowed (because I wanted an image that I could use as the basis for another one, rather than exactly as it is now)

and clicked on Fotopedia, I was shown:

From here I could use the search tools in Fotopedia to refine my image-search and find just the right picture that I could use to represent a Christmas carol worksheet on my blog.

What sources are included

Today, the sources that are linked to from Creative Commons search are:

• Eurpoeana - media
• Flickr - pictures
• Fotopedia - pictures
• Google web - web search results
• Google images - pictures
• Jamenda - music
• Open Clip Art Library - images
• SpinXpress - media
• Wikimedia Commons - media
• YouTube - video
• Pixabay - images
• ccMixter - music
• SoundCloud - music

It wouldn't surprise me if this list grow/shrinks, as sites become more or less useful as sources of public-domain or creative-commons-licensed materials.

Things to watch out for

Creative Commons cannot guarantee that the results of searches that start in their tools will always be available for re-use: source systems may change their approach, items may be mis-tagged, content owners may change their mind, etc. So they recommend that you should always click-through to the original image in the source site, and double-check the license and attribution requirements there.

Also, some sites may allow you to link directly to the copy of the image on their site. this can be a lot quicker than making your own copy, uploading it and included it in your blog.  But doing this means that the image will not be used as the thumbnail-image for your post. And if the picture is ever removed from the original site - or its web-site address there changes - then the link in your blog will not work any more.

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Related Articles:

Bloggers and Copyright - an overview

Protecting your blog-contents from copyright theft

Taking action when someone has used your copyright materials

Thumbnail images - a picture to summarise each post

Adding a picture to Blogger