Thwarting Content Theft - Escalation
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Usually that’s as far as you need to take it; most site owners you’ll encounter are reasonable and will do as you requested. But some aren’t. In that case, you’ll need to follow through and contact their web host.
You can find out who is hosting their domain through Whois once again, and of course you can use that tool to get the contact information for the web host. The person you will need to contact is whoever handles DMCA claims at the web host. Check the site’s Terms of Service or “legal” page. If you can’t find it there, the US Copyright Office has a list of agents. There’s a good chance the web host has registered there, because they can’t claim protection under the DMCA without registering. A check under Go Daddy on this list at the time of writing revealed that their designated DMCA agent, for example, is Ben Butler; it also gives the postal address, phone number, and email address at which to contact him with DMCA issues.
If you want to try hitting the content thief in the pocketbook, you may be able to contact his advertisers. This is much easier said than done. Google’s AdSense has a DMCA policy; it will not take action unless you send a DMCA takedown notice. Unfortunately, they will only accept communications of this kind via fax or postal mail.
DMCA stand for Digital Millennium Copyright Act, of course, and a DMCA takedown notice should include the following information:
- That your letter is a Notice of Infringement as authorized in § 512(c) of the US copyright law.
- That you are reporting what you feel is in good faith an instance of copyright infringement (this may be more important than you think; DMCA takedown notices filed in bad faith can open the filer to a lawsuit).
- The title(s) of the work under contention.
- The web site address where the plagiarism appears.
- The web site address where the original material appears.
- Your contact information: name, address, phone number, and email address.
Again, Plagiarism Today has a great template you can use with blanks in the right places so you can just put in your own information as it applies to your case.
The ultimate level involves going to the search engines. They are required by law to remove infringing URLs from their indexes. This doesn’t actually remove the content from the web, but it does help prevent other people from finding it. Google has a Site Status Wizard which you can use to find out whether the site is listed in the first place, and monitor to make sure it is removed from the search engine’s index. Be aware that Google requires a handwritten signature on a DMCA takedown notice before it will take action. But with any luck, you’ll never have to go this far.
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