How do I combat content theft?

[flowsimple]

A new site popped up that has completely replicated a site own by my client. This site is literally a copycat, scraped all the content, and copied the design down to the colors.

I've already reported the site to the hosting provider and filled a spam report on Google. I noticed that the author changed some of the text, and internal links so that they don't link to our site anymore. Some of these were missed.

I'm also going to take a couple preventative actions like change stuff in .htaccess, but that doesn't help me now,  just in case it happens again in the future.

I'm wondering what else i can or should be doing?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Hi Pashmina!

The best recommendation would be to Initiate a DMCA Take-down procedure.  Essentially it's filing a notice with their host that the site is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which should get their host to take action more readily than simply contacting them.  It says "we're serious and will pursue this".  The same notice should go to the site owner if you can get valid contact info for them.  You can read about this more and see a sample notice here http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/07/06/sample-dmca-take-down-letter/id=4501/

Note that the infringing party does not have to have a 100% complete copy - only that they go beyond "fair use" of a minor portion of content.  If we're talking about major swaths of content, look and feel, it's pretty cut and dried.

Beyond that, it's really best to contact an attorney who specializes in digital law.

For individual articles, that's generally much more challenging because there's so much scraping going on.  My take on it and now common thinking within the industry by some notable people is it's not worth going after sites that scrape when those sites scrape from multiple sources.  They're usually impossible to find valid contact info on, and Google does a "fair" job at discerning origin source.

To help in that, Google's got their new article origin tag, but the best thing to do is to ensure content links to other pages within the site (most scrapers fail to strip that out), and include a standard paragraph at the closing of every page's content about the content being original information located on Domain.com (without making it a link so it's harder for scrapers to strip out). Or even better, also including the company name.

And finally, theory has it that scraper links might actually not be a bad thing for those scrapers that leave them in, since a lot of scraper content actually does rank

[Tompt]

One of our sites has be quite well scraped already, and because we use absolute linking throughout the site we are getting a few links from the sites in question. I don't anticipate the links being worth a great deal but they may be helpful.

Provided that you're using absolute linking and your content is getting crawled first it shouldn't be a problem.

People will always copy good content, and it probably takes less time for them to scrape and set a site up than it does for you to do do something about it.