One fine day, I got this email.
Pingbacks are notifications you get from WordPress (and other similar blogging platforms) when someone links to a post on your blog. I get an email for every pingback and I usually ignore it. But this time, this Pingback is different.
It reeked nasty.
When I clicked on the URL to see how the outside site has linked to one of my recently published article, Introducing – The Carnival of Weekend Wanderings, this appeared:
I instantly recognize the image. This is the same one I’ve used in my blog post.
Scrolling down, I knew what happened: my content was stolen. Or rather scraped, posted on this blog to claim as their own. But wait – see the words…the have been substituted to be a little different than the original post, never mind the ridiculous grammar!
Further proof that this post is really mine? THIS.
The content thief did not even bother to take out my email address and only replaced “at” with “during” which made it look stupid.
Now, what would you do if someone steals your blog content and post it as their own? Do you ignore it and just enjoy the back links or do something about it?
I CAN’T IGNORE IT. Here’s what I did, aiming to let them take down that stolen content:
1. I confronted the website owner by leaving a comment on the website, putting the link to the original post and politely asking to take down the stolen content.
When I hit the “Submit” button in the comments and realized that my comment would never appear as went for moderation, I know I have to find another way to contact them – but the website had no “About” section nor any information of the content thief.
2. I contacted the host of the content thief website by using the IP address in the Pingback. You can track host information via http://www.whois.sc/
I found out that the content thief used Dream Host and there’s an email address to handle abuse so I wrote to them informing that one of the websites they’re hosting violated copyright infringement law.
Then I waited. And tweeted a lot about it while waiting!
In less than 24 hours, Dream Host replied to me:
The domain of concern has been taken offline until our customer can remove the allegedly infringing content per your DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notification.
I checked and yes, the website was removed from the face of the internet last week. They are back now though but have deleted two of my posts they scraped off from my blog. As for their other posts? There were a lot of stolen content before which appeared to have been deleted already as well. I am not sure that what’s left are not stolen content but whatever, as long as they’re removed mine.
Has someone stolen your content? What did you do?
Great read regarding this topic
What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content
The Definitive Guide to Blog Content Scraping & How to Stop It!
Finding Backroads 
This is a nightmare! I hope it never happens to me but you handled it great!
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You were lucky that you were able to contact them and the host. I had a website that literally lifted everything from a post of mine about my wedding. Their mistake was pinging back to the photos. They were caught red handed and TechyDad (webmaster/hubby) helped me to stop it. I wrote about it here and there is also a link to how he did it: http://www.theangelforever.com/2012/09/stolen-words-photos-and-the-nickmom-fiasco/
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As Beth said, her content was stolen once. Since they just linked to her images, I was able to write a HTAccess rule to replace any images they had on their site with another image (one calling them out as a “dirty, rotten content thief”. Here’s my blog post showing how I did it:
http://www.techydad.com/2012/06/how-to-deal-with-a-content-thief/
Feel free to copy this approach if your content is ever stolen again and the thief’s host isn’t as cooperative.
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that’s plain plagiarism, good thing you we’re able to do something about it.
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Good thing you did something about it! When I started blogging a long time ago I remember someone copied something of my blog but I didn’t do anything since I wasn’t sure what to do. I think I’d be more protective over my stuff now, it’s ridiculous how people can be so lazy not to ask permission when they clearly copied it.
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Ah, happened to me last year, too. And the sad thing is that the person who copied my blog posts posted them at the site where she was earning. So that means she earns from the articles that she just copy and paste, earning from other people’s thoughts, and earning without effort. Sheeeesh.
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Ah yes, this terrible problem. This actually happened to me around a month or two back. Found a website which had stolen from multiple food bloggers and re-written the posts with such abysmal grammar, just like here. Alexander McNabb kindly ran the same procedure you did, and we got the contact details of the person. I tweeted directly, asked him to take all the posts down. He claimed it wasn’t him, he had hired a “writer” and all her posts were run through a copying programme to make sure they were real (yeah, right) and blah blah blah. Other bloggers were more discreet and emailed him directly/commented on a blog post etc. I was more angry and tweet-blasted him. Soon others on my timeline got in on the act and he removed all the posts!!!
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I guess this happens a lot although it is the first time for me – or at least the first time I detected it!
Glad you solved your problem, it was probably a good idea to tweet blast!
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