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.

Work the Wave

For some strange reason, writing jobs tend to come in waves. Sometimes there’s no work at all. But when there is work, there’s lots of it.

So what do you do during the drought?

Space your work out. When you get hit with a lot of work at one time, spread your deadlines so they don’t fall within the same short period of time. If you don’t have any work scheduled for next week, push one of your projects to that week.

Work on your own projects. It’s a good idea for writers to have their own projects outside of client work. Use your “drought” times to work on your own niche websites or blogs. Thinking about making an information product? That’s a good time to work on it.

Market and network. When you don’t have any work, use that time to get more work. Do some extra marketing. Network with fellow writers and even professionals within your niche.

What do you find yourself doing during down times?

Writer’s Brew is Back!

You may remember me from such blogs as writersbrew.blogspot.com. Well, here I am again. New domain, new host, new look.

I tried to use the nifty Wordpress tool to import all the old posts from Blogger, but it didn’t work. So, I’ll be starting anew. New domain, new host, new look, new posts.