I have written several times recently about copyright violation and the blogger, and I list some of the articles below so that you can read them if you are interested. Taking action against plagiarists is not always easy to do and I am writing this article to share my experience with you. I learnt from it and it may help you if you decide to follow my example.
On February 11th, I discovered that a site had reproduced an article of mine without permission. The pictures were not included (perhaps because they are watermarked) and the article was ascribed to my blog but this is still copyright violation and I see no reason why I should stand for it. I prefer not to use real names in this account and will call the plagiarist site BlogX.
BlogX uses WordPress software, so my first step was to contact WordPress support. They, however, told me that as they had merely sold the software and did not host the site, they were unable to take any action. I therefore went back to the site to see whether I could find out anything there.
Unsurprisingly, BlogX has comments closed and posts no information on how to contact the owner. It was a blind alley. My next step, therefore, was to use a Whois search engine to look up details of the site’s domain registration. This in turn referred me to a domain reseller I shall call ResellerY. Using the Whois on the latter’s site, I found the administrator email address for BlogX and sent the following email:
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I am writing to you as the registrant of the site BlogX which has plagiarised my blog. It has published a post of mine without permission or authorization and is therefore in breach of copyright. The article concerned appears here: [URL of copy] and is an acknowledged copy of my original here: [URL of my original] Please see to it that the plagiarised copy is removed forthwith from the BlogX site and that no more of my material is copied without permission. Regards, SilverTiger |
Five days later, I had received no reply and the plagiarized article was still in place. In view of the lack of response, I decided to "escalate" the complaint by contacting the site’s host (as I thought it was), ResellerY. As there was no specific contact listed for abuse, I clicked on general support and was taken to an email form. In my message, I stated the fact of the plagiarism, giving the respective URLs and saying that the host had a responsibility to ensure that the sites it hosted stayed within the law. (They are, of course, aware of this, and I won’t include that phrase in future complaints.)
That same evening, I received a reply from ResellerY but it wasn’t quite what I had hoped for:
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Thank you for contacting Online Support. After reviewing the DNS for the domain, it appears that the domain is hosted by a third party. You will need to contact the hosting provider for assistance with this issue. |
They did however attach attach information showing that the nameservers for BlogX belonged to a company I shall call HostZ. When I checked their Web site, they seemed a conventional hosting service, established in Chicago, USA. On the contacts page there was a list of email addresses to use in contacting them for various purposes, and I chose one for abuse. I sent them a message similar to the one I had sent to ResellerY and later the same day, I received this response:
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SilverTiger, We’ll need you to send us a properly formatted DMCA notice regarding this. Without this we will not be able to remove any content from this server. Thanks, |
Now, I have to admit that until I read this I had never heard of a DMCA notice and had to look it up. The initials stand for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and, as far as I know, the form, which is also known as a “Take-down notice”, for obvious reasons, is applicable only to sites hosted in the US.
The form is unusually simple and clear, so I won’t go into details about filling it in. Suffice it to so that it asks for the expected information such as the location of original material, the location of the alleged copy and personal details to identify the complainant.
I sent off the form at 17:03 on February 17th and then waited. Then on Friday, February 19th, at 12:59 our time, HostZ sent me an email with the following text:
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Hello, We have contacted the person responsible for this blog. The article will be removed within 24 hours. Thanks, |
This seemed to be a success but before celebrating, I was going to wait until the article actually disappeared. I checked the URL several times and eventually received a “404 Not Found” error. Success confirmed!
ResellerY also thoughtfully emailed me saying that the page had been removed and inviting me to contact them again if necessary. I emailed them my thanks. It is a pleasure to deal with people who take action so effectively and willingly.
I will know better how to deal with future cases of plagiarism and I hope other bloggers will be encouraged by this example to take similarly firm action.
Previous articles
Still scraping
Copyright violation and the blogger
A minor victory
LiveJournal takes action
Well done. I am sure I would have given up at an earlier stage. But I shall keep this lodged in my head so that if I do ever have this problem I can refer back to it. Actually I will probably ask your advice.
I am glad it was taken down. But it seems to me that there is probably more plagiarised material out there.
Is it because of the plagiarism that you have switched to a short feed? I keep wondering if I should switch back to one as obviously I would be more secure that way. But I know some people find them very irritating (not me).
I have read that plagiarists often get their material from RSS feeds so I limited mine. However, I am in two minds about it and may revert back because by curtailing it, I am punishing the innocent along with the guilty.
As you say, there’s a lot of plagiarized material out there as people don’t know about it unless they look for it. Tracking it down plagiarism and complaining about it is very time consuming. I try to bear in mind that I blog for the fun of it and that if I allow plagiarism to take over my life then that is counter-productive. Balance in all things!
Even so, it is a great feeling when another one bites the dust!
Well done. There is a small risk of a DMCA notice back-firing (some unlucky bloggers have ended up footing large legal fees as a result of issuing perfectly legitimate DMCA notices though admittedly the chances of such are very low). Good work though.
Interesting. How did that come about?
I assumed that the host wanted the notice to be sure that I could assert my copyright. That wasn’t in doubt as the plagiarist had acknowledged the source.
Many of my posts in a past blog were copied and posted on other blogs with a link back to my site but using a different authors name. Infuriated me. I started a process like you have here but I hit a dead end and got no further assitance. I remember one of the responding emails from someone mentioned basically that it’s a free-for-all out here, especially for those of us who blog anonymously. In other words, all the offender did was lift an anonymous blogger’s work and there was no way to prove that work was truly that blogger’s work. Having said that, I read a blog recently, she’s an author as well, so she uses her real name on her blog, she knows her work gets lifted all the time by college students. So, it seems there is a certain amount of risk on the internet no matter who you are and we live with it and or fight it when we can.
I don’t know if it’s working but for me, I started a new blog and I set it up so that it can’t be found in search engines, and every post I set so that there can be no pingbacks to my blog. This way they can’t link back to me and I get no spam.
Hi SilverTiger. Found you at Reluctant Blogger’s blog.
Hi Zoe,
Your work belongs to you; it is copyright; and no one has the right to take it without your permission. The name you use is immaterial. Remarks like “It’s a free-for-all” are self-serving lies.
We have a right to proceed against those who steal our work and we can prove it is ours by the date when it was published and by such things as possessing drafts, originals of photos, etc.
In any case, it is usually not difficult to prove ownership, either because the plagiarist quotes the source or includes photos which link back to the original blog.
One thing I would say is that many bloggers accept their work being quoted: that is the basis of the Creative Commons licence that I don’t use for that reason. Therefore, if we don’t want our work copied, we should put a copyright notice on our blog stating this fact in order to avoid all “misunderstanding”.
The fact is, of course, that there is a limit to how far we can go to protect our copyright. Most of us cannot go as far as legal action, for example. When our limit is reached, we just have to accept it and walk away. My attitude is that I blog for fun and pleasure and that to allow it to give me sleepless nights would therefore be counter-productive.
I think bloggers could get together to help one another but tend to be too individualistic and independent.
I agree.