ROI on Policing Scraped Content

[ahirai]

Over the years, tons of original content from my website (written by me) has been scraped by 200-300 external sites. I've been using Copyscape to identify the offenders. It is EXTREMELY time consuming to identify the site owners, prepare an email with supporting evidence (screen shots), and following up 2, 3, 15 times until they remove the scraped content. Filing DMCA takedowns are a final option for sites hosted in the US, but quite a few of the offenders are in China, India, Nigeria, and other places not subject to DMCA. Sometimes, when a site owner takes down scraped content, it reappears a few months or years later. It's exasperating.

My site already performs well in the SERPs - I'm not aware of a third party site's scraped content outperforming my site for any search phrase.

Given my circumstances, how much effort do you think I should continue to put into policing scraped content?

[EGOL]

Over the years, tons of original content from my website (written by me) has been scraped by 200-300 external sites.

I have the same problem on multiple sites.  Most of the time the scraping is not harmful.  But, on several occasions it has cost me thousands of dollars and forced me to abandon product lines and donate thousands of dollars worth of inventory to Goodwill.  Infringers have included websites of many law firms, a state supreme court. a presidential candidate, an Ivy League law school and many others.  Infringers can be using images, video or text.

It is EXTREMELY time consuming to identify the site owners, prepare an email with supporting evidence (screen shots), and following up 2, 3, 15 times until they remove the scraped content.  Filing DMCA takedowns are a final option for sites hosted in the US,....

I am not an expert in intellectual property law, so what I do or say is not advice.  Filing a DMCA can get you sued even if you are in the right. If you file a DMCA all of the details including your name and why you filed will be easily available to the person or company that you complained about.  They can retaliate against you, call begging you to retract the DMCA, they can do anything they want against you.

If I contact someone two or three times without results I go straight to DMCA.    One thing that I can say about Google is that they generally respond promptly about removing infringing content from their web SERPs and image SERPs.  They also generally respond promptly to infringing content on Blogspot and YouTube.   Ebay will shut down auctions en masse in response to a DMCA if a seller or group of sellers are using your images or other property.

When infringing content is on a university, government agency, or prominent company's website they usually respond immediately to notification.  I usually contact a provost, legal department, or internal manager instead of writing to "webmaster" - who probably was involved in the problem and simply does not understand intellectual property.   I usually don't prepare a big document.  An email pointing out the infringing work and offering a resolution of "take it down right away" will usually get fast results.

quite a few of the offenders are in China, India, Nigeria, and other places not subject to DMCA.

If you can't identify the owner of the website or if they are outside of the USA, you can still file a DMCA to have the content removed from search engines or websites like YouTube or Blogspot who have an international user community but are owned by a US company.  Some of them will insist that you deal with their infringing member, having an attorney contact them might yield quick results.

A lot of the professional spam is done from outside of the USA but there are a few spammers and simply arrogant cowboys in the USA.  DMCA is the route to take, but you do risk retaliation with some of them.

Sometimes, when a site owner takes down scraped content, it reappears a few months or years later. It's exasperating.

Yep.

I spend a good amount of time protecting my content.   The problem is so big that I can usually only afford to do it in situations where the scraping, infringing or whatever is costing me or my content is appearing on the website of an established business or organization who should have people in leadership positions who would not want that happening.

I watch my analytics watching for traffic drops, etc. Occasionally I go out looking for infringement.  The cost of policing can be astronomical.  I could have a full time employee working on this if I was going after everyone - and its not cost effective.  Most of the people who are grabbing your stuff are putting it on domains that can't damage your rankings.

A greater problem than verbatim theft, in my opinion, is the people who grab your articles and simply rewrite them.  You spent tons of time doing the research and preparing the presentation.  They simply do a paragraph-by-paragraph rewrite into something that is not detectable or recognizable beyond structure.

Good luck.

[ahirai]

Thanks for the detailed suggestions!

As a follow up: what metric do you use to decide which offenders to go after, and which ones to ignore? I simply don't have time to go after everybody who has copied my content so I need a way to prioritize.

There are two obvious situations where action is warranted: first, when the infringement is committed by a competitor in my industry, and second, when the infringing content outperforms my own site in the SERPs. What else would you suggest?

Thanks again.

[EGOL]

I watch my traffic increases and decreases.   You can do that with google analytics.  I do it with clicky.  When I see an important page show traffic losses, I go looking.

One of my retail sites suddenly was not selling a certain product category very well.  I looked into it and hundreds of "made in China" blogs had scraped my content.

Then, I have images that are often grabbed.  I watch image search traffic and watch for them.

I have tens of thousands of pages on the web.  Its hard to monitor all of them, but it is easy to monitor when you can download a traffic spreadsheet that has % up and % down, sort it and then investigate.  So, I am being responsive instead of proactive.  And, really, I don't look at it as ROI, it is loss prevention.