Unfortunately, Internet theft is a fact of life.  Some people think anything they see on a website is in the public domain and copy content and images freely.  It’s always puzzled me why Google came up with the Google Images concept.  To me, it just encourages Internet theft because it seems like those images are there for everyone’s use.  The reality is that the vast majority of those images are protected by copyright.

Some people realize they shouldn’t steal  content from other websites, but they think no one will notice.  To those people, just a warning:  it’s very simple to identify when content has been stolen, so the best strategy is just not to do it!

Contacting an Internet Thief

If you’ve had your content stolen, here are some tips on what to do about it.  In my experience, it’s often easiest just to write the thief a semi-friendly e-mail asking for the stolen content to be removed from the website.  If the thief falls into the “I thought this was public domain content” group, they usually respond quickly.  A sample e-mail could be something like this:

It has come to my attention that the information on the [ENTER URL] page of your website is a duplication of the information on my website at:  [ENTER URL FOR THE EXACT PAGE]

In addition to being a copyright infringement, your use of the exact content of my page has a negative impact on both sites’ standings with the search engines.

Please remove the information from your site that duplicates my site’s content immediately, and let me know when that has happened.

Thank you for your cooperation.

If that doesn’t produce the desired result, your second step would be sending a formal cease and desist e-mail.  Here are several examples:

• Cease and desist sample
• Cease and desist sample
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• Cease and desist sample

If the cease and desist e-mail produces no results, then you need to decide whether to involve an attorney and get involved in litigation.

Discovering and Responding to Internet Theft

You can use a service like Copyscape to determine if any of your content has been stolen.  Copyscape provides a free service where you can check one page of your site at a time.  I developed and maintain a website for a home stager.  There is one page on her site that is often duplicated.  So, we just use the free version of Copyscape to monitor that page.  Copyscape also has a paid service that will automatically check your pages in more depth.

Another handy thing offered by Copyscape are free banners that you can use to (hopefully) increase visitors’ awareness of the fact that your content is copyrighted.  And, Copyscape provides information about avoiding, spotting and dealing with web theft.

There’s another great site where you can learn more about copyright and web theft issues.  It’s a blog called Plagiarism Today.  The link sends you to a page about web theft.  If you look at the menu on the right of the blog, you’ll find other information about copyright on the Internet and how to stop plagiarism or deal with it when it happens.

My Advice:  Don’t Let Web Theft Go Unchallenged

We all work very hard to make our websites content-rich.  Some people have paid someone to create the content on their site – in that situation, the theft is really like taking money out of someone’s pocket.  Sometimes the theft gives the thief an unfair competitive advantage, and you’ll win in a court by assigning a price to the impact of the theft.  In any case, duplicate content on the Internet is not healthy for anyone.

If web theft goes unchallenged, it will only get worse – naturally.  Maybe someday enough people will be educated about web theft so that we can eliminate theft by that group of people who don’t realize they’re doing anything wrong.

Then, we can eliminate the first contact e-mail, and just go after folks who are stealing content with malicious intent!