How to punish a thief

I try not to get so angry at content thieves because some of them really don’t know that you can’t just take someone else’s content and put it up on your site. These are the best kinds of “thieves” to deal with because they take your content down with a simple request.

When I find stolen content, the first thing I do is contact the person and let them know the content is copyrighted and can’t be used without permission. You can offer resell rights if you want to go that route or just request that they take the content down. Give them a reasonable amount of time, e.g. a week, to take the content down. If a week goes by and you don’t get a response and the content’s still there, it’s time to take it to the next level.

Have the site de-indexed and shut down by their host.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows you to have the copyright violator’s site taken down. You can exercise your rights under this act by sending a DMCA notice to the search engines and to the webmaster’s ISP. SEO Logic has instructions for sending DCMA notices to all the major search engines.

Next, find out who’s hosting the site. WhoIs.com and DomainTools.com are two good places to start. Look for the Name Servers part of the page and the middle part will tell you who’s the host. If that doesn’t work, there are some more techie ways to find out the host. Google “find website host” and some of the results will give you an idea of what to do.