Filing an Effective DMCA Complaint

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTdZdYpOV04UdYDeX4n4-PvPM_NV5lZMsMqs0VSwA85AuM8yFU8WbAAdHefKLo-_c-hf-IHu2eFoqVjh7f3tXxYiuK3Q_9PU1v6FGNeAv9ugGlU7GgG-jlnHA8xmShroaA6luHgShSn4M/s1600/OHNOStickGirl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="A stickgirl character with blonde hair and an orange bow asking for help." border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="329" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTdZdYpOV04UdYDeX4n4-PvPM_NV5lZMsMqs0VSwA85AuM8yFU8WbAAdHefKLo-_c-hf-IHu2eFoqVjh7f3tXxYiuK3Q_9PU1v6FGNeAv9ugGlU7GgG-jlnHA8xmShroaA6luHgShSn4M/s200/OHNOStickGirl.jpg" title="Help Stick Girl" width="93" /></a>In the past, I've covered various ways of protecting your contents, and as a result, protecting your AdSense account. This is more of "that" ... because some foolish person decided it would be cool to copy the articles from my blog ... THIS blog.<br /><br />Filing the notice is the only way to really handle this, but the process is slow. Not only does it take time once you file the reports, if a person has copied a lot of your posts and are hosted on Blogger, the process involves including ALL the URLs copied, both from your blog, and from the copied blog.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiydtzuc-Q5b9Scqk-3siR9OhrYbBx-TBHUJrZ51Wv7wBJZCJK_DHUxF9dVsF9Ro6AmBycWTZL3zjoZTvOPouaCR3stPFCHhru1SEl0pUu2MaN_rCCLEi5iPJGBLXAEFvjksMaBGnhjusU/s1600/BLOGSCRAPER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="A screenshot of my content on a scraper's blog." border="0" data-original-height="815" data-original-width="517" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiydtzuc-Q5b9Scqk-3siR9OhrYbBx-TBHUJrZ51Wv7wBJZCJK_DHUxF9dVsF9Ro6AmBycWTZL3zjoZTvOPouaCR3stPFCHhru1SEl0pUu2MaN_rCCLEi5iPJGBLXAEFvjksMaBGnhjusU/s400/BLOGSCRAPER.jpg" title="My Articles" width="252" /></a>Digging through content on someone's blog and keeping track of all the copied URLs can take a huge chunk of time, no matter how you do it. If they don't use the exact same post tiles, then it's harder to find the URLs related to your content.  Once you have that list, you'll have to go through your own blog to find the matching list of contents.<br /><br />Once you've completed that, you're ready to file the DMCA notice. No, you can't just give the main URL of the blog that copied you and say remove this blog. You have to list the individual URLs - and yes, I know this is frustrating and time consuming, but unless you complete and submit the process properly, nothing may be done at all.<br /><br />This (screenshot above) is not my blog, but it sure as heck looks like my content - my cartoon characters, my textual contents, most of them are also the titles of my posts. Even worse is the fact that this person has also claimed the copyright for my blog.  And that was, as they say ... "the straw that broke the camel's back".  I spent a day searching the blog for my content, made a list, and then got the list of URLs from my site. And filed the DMCA report.<br /><a name="more"></a><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipHMEwXRPyApySgzetse864vxUPCXPtNbNMDqBlqHtLi-5LcSMcPO41JfM6Tl2QE5YAoyO0xZblBpFpfmF1xPyLLqhHe0YrBFqwb33C33bnqktI8AiOytTEwYP1-mAPwy-0RytzeCKRsg/s1600/blogscraper2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Screenshot of a footer from an unnamed blog." border="0" data-original-height="54" data-original-width="731" height="29" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipHMEwXRPyApySgzetse864vxUPCXPtNbNMDqBlqHtLi-5LcSMcPO41JfM6Tl2QE5YAoyO0xZblBpFpfmF1xPyLLqhHe0YrBFqwb33C33bnqktI8AiOytTEwYP1-mAPwy-0RytzeCKRsg/s400/blogscraper2.jpg" title="Footer" width="400" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaEBYRc8hk4y0E1uLkvdNRpZ5RRNuzOf2mIsX134V2miVm0rqmBz7i8SJj3KdgikEcEHXDm5jRlQSugzfoXlDj-slzcSOJ5SiF1HirWi-nkbbWdbcep-VAlsUI-y59rl226mz3Bu54ZD8/s1600/stickgirlIndia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Stickgirl figure dressed in an Indian sari." border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="159" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaEBYRc8hk4y0E1uLkvdNRpZ5RRNuzOf2mIsX134V2miVm0rqmBz7i8SJj3KdgikEcEHXDm5jRlQSugzfoXlDj-slzcSOJ5SiF1HirWi-nkbbWdbcep-VAlsUI-y59rl226mz3Bu54ZD8/s200/stickgirlIndia.jpg" title="Stickgirl India" width="127" /></a>Now it's a waiting game. Patience is an important quality when you file a DMCA. When you file through Blogger, you do get a link to your "removal dashboard" so you can check on the status. Currenly, it says "pending" ... that's because I just submitted it a few days ago, and from previous experience I know that the DMCA process can sometimes take as long as a month. A faster process would be really nice, but as with all things, doing it right takes time. And doing it right is really the only way to go.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZJxO2PF5TGPVwM5fFLo2mD6B-nlsBmmjEMj8YaRj2jUyPumQnKeEUp1I5ar0cfsFTmtRohwpgcr2CZ0j8UjFlWMsY9kSToGX7Bdj1GEgHJ9yWIAR2cK94_ib2pGjpWwW0aUoWSNCf6Yk/s1600/RemovalDashboard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="1600" height="140" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZJxO2PF5TGPVwM5fFLo2mD6B-nlsBmmjEMj8YaRj2jUyPumQnKeEUp1I5ar0cfsFTmtRohwpgcr2CZ0j8UjFlWMsY9kSToGX7Bdj1GEgHJ9yWIAR2cK94_ib2pGjpWwW0aUoWSNCf6Yk/s640/RemovalDashboard.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />The person receiving the notice will be able to file a counter-claim (which would be foolish in this case, since they can't prove they wrote the content.) and the process take several weeks from the time that person receives the DMCA notice. They have something like 14 days to respond (unless that's changed recently). How long it takes for them to receive the notice after you file can depend on how many notices have been filed recently.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGz5X5zqLoska9dMx0WTV6pwG9jh3wMEipJFD26-4GvHZZR8MV0moYTQ8g98CewaPwxTYsVKV0a_yOhNY5KTntG4YxxeNVWgkRDhC9fsChfNOmtlE73eAAOSCLKaUZD-iwrOCnTksU0TU/s1600/originalstickgirlsmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Stickgirl holding a pencil with the word original overtop of her." border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGz5X5zqLoska9dMx0WTV6pwG9jh3wMEipJFD26-4GvHZZR8MV0moYTQ8g98CewaPwxTYsVKV0a_yOhNY5KTntG4YxxeNVWgkRDhC9fsChfNOmtlE73eAAOSCLKaUZD-iwrOCnTksU0TU/s320/originalstickgirlsmall.jpg" title="Original StickGirl" width="285" /></a></div>This isn't the first time I've filed DMCA notices, but it's the first time I've filed one through Blogger. It's also the first time I've filed one with that many URLs at one time, previously the most I've filed for was 7 at one time.<br /><br />People who do such things (scrape or copy content) are completely annoying to the people who create the original work. It's not exactly a legal crime of huge proportions, but people can be sued for doing such a thing, particularly if it can be proven that the person's use of the original content has caused harm to the originator (financially, or by reputation). I don't intend to go that far, and doing so takes much more work, and usually involves the need of a legal representative (which will cost you money, especially if you lose the case).<br /><br />For me, the most annoying thing of it all that the person has taken credit for the work I've done, and copied some of my ad code, and I won't sit still for that. Dumber still is the fact that some of my content still has my author bio at the end. That in itself would provide enough proof to the DMCA complaint that I am the originator of the content.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnvopYnyZX77KJRvoT8Iclzz8prkQvSk2-3Aub4xhprUIFvcJBh5lPnweH5-cnVvF-TX5l1T03COOaA57LP3-jv1otnI68M6kYC-BRcKIv-OcBo-VE_MUJnyMmbX6Ey3pTUS6V_4HuqvI/s1600/Stickgirl7.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="431" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnvopYnyZX77KJRvoT8Iclzz8prkQvSk2-3Aub4xhprUIFvcJBh5lPnweH5-cnVvF-TX5l1T03COOaA57LP3-jv1otnI68M6kYC-BRcKIv-OcBo-VE_MUJnyMmbX6Ey3pTUS6V_4HuqvI/s320/Stickgirl7.png" width="229" /></a>99% of the time when I find my work somewhere else, it's a single post, or an image used without permission. Usually in a case like that, I'll send an email directly to the site owner through their contact page, and ask them to either remove the content (in the case of an article I usually insist on this), or to at least credit me for the work and provide a link to my website (usually for images). Most people simply didn't know they couldn't use it without permission, and will remove the content, or provide appropriate credit.<br /><br />And while I know there are some of you that would like to retaliate when it happens to you ... that would make you no better than the perpetrator. It might be fun to think about sending out some little piece of script that would wipe the blog off the internet, but that's the wrong way to handle this sort of situation and in the end ... it would only give you a passing satisfaction. Doing the wrong thing in response to another wrong thing is never the way to deal with an issue.<br /><br />Always use the right methods ... be the "better man" and do the right thing.<br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">posted by J.Gracey Stinson </span></div></div>

Filing an Effective DMCA Complaint

In the past, I've covered various ways of protecting your contents, and as a result, protecting your AdSense account. This is more of ...

Read more »

Copied Content Syndrome (Or Why I Got Disabled/Rejected for Adsense)

In the last few weeks we've seen an increasing number of AdSense publishers in the forums with disabled accounts. While we see disabled publishers pretty often, the number of publishers being disabled for having blogs with no original content is increasing.<br /><br />AdSense has been cracking down on the copied content issue - or so it seems. So why is copied content an issue?<br /><br /><b style="color: #3d85c6;">COPYRIGHT </b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0dH6qNqyIuwFfywFfXP-lMk_CC-29VQONVaGjyvwEV4zVDrZKorlOLKl2xq_C8hBdYtQA4dvnEwHWyzuP-OamB-qw1g7KLoUeeYKoDp6t61ieIFXClH9YWWau5W2E0TsGzfV9aRmPZ4c/s1600/originalstickgirlsmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0dH6qNqyIuwFfywFfXP-lMk_CC-29VQONVaGjyvwEV4zVDrZKorlOLKl2xq_C8hBdYtQA4dvnEwHWyzuP-OamB-qw1g7KLoUeeYKoDp6t61ieIFXClH9YWWau5W2E0TsGzfV9aRmPZ4c/s320/originalstickgirlsmall.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>There is of course the obvious reason; content copied from other authors and bloggers is copyright content. If the blogger or author has not given permission, and has not licensed their article using the Creative Commons designation, then the author has every right to expect exclusive rights to their work. That means you can't just borrow or re-use, re-purpose or redistribute the work that someone else has done. Authors discovering their work on someone else's blog will find it necessary to file a DMCA complaint, and this entails work for the author as well as investigation on the part of AdSense (or Blogger) staff. It's time that shouldn't have to be spent when bloggers and webmasters respect each other's creative work. For the author who writes their own original work, it means that they may be subject to having their AdSense account disabled because of duplicated work - in other words, even though they've written their own articles if others have copied their article to hundreds of different places, they may face disablement due to someone else's behaviour. Generally, if an author can prove their work was original they'll have a decent chance of retaining their account, but it causes a great deal of trouble for the authors of original work to have their work copied.<br /><br />From the <a href="http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182">AdSense Program Policies</a> (which all publishers must adhere to) we have this excerpt:<br /><br /><b>AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on webpages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our <a href="http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html">DMCA policy</a> for more information. </b><br /><br /><div style="color: #3d85c6;"><b>PLAGIARISM</b></div><br />When  you use someone else's work without giving that author credit for the work, that's considered plagiarism. Although you may not directly place your own copyright or name name on the work, omitting the credit for the original author is seen as taking credit for the work yourself.<br /><br />Not only does this put you and your AdSense account at risk, it gives you no credibility at all in terms of knowledge or experience. If you have a blog full of articles about marketing, then you need to have marketing skills and experience to write about it. If you don't, and you are simply copying what someone else has written, how do you know the information you are providing to your readers is even correct?  As an example, I have seen many blogs written by AdSense publishers - some of those have little experience with AdSense, or are new to AdSense and some of the "advice" they offer is not only wrong, it can get a publisher disabled.<br /><br /><div style="color: #3d85c6;"><b>ADSENSE POLICY</b></div><br />Regardless of the foregoing, AdSense sets the rules for the type of content they want to see in a publishers blog. By that, I don't mean they'll tell you what you can write about - that's up to you, but they do get to choose based on content whether or not a publsiher even gets approval for an AdSense account.<br /><br />AdSense expects it's publishers to work for their income - nobody gets money for nothing in today's world. They look for original work - whether it's articles, artwork, photos or other types of information, they want their publisher's to add something original to the internet, rather than just regurgitating someone else's work. They want your own unique thoughts and articles - and most likely, so will your readers and visitors appreciate a thoughtful article you've written yourself over some canned article from an article catalog.<br /><br />One of the items in the AdSense Program Policies is a link to the Webmaster Guidelines - publishers must also adhere to these, and AdSense expects publishers to read them, and follow their suggestions.<br /><br />An excerpt from those guidelines:<br /><br /><b><strong>Scraped content</strong>: Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.</b><br /><br /> This doesn't mean that you can't use an article, or a part of an article as a reference in your own written work (as I've done here by quoting the guidelines directly), it means you can't simply "scrape" the content from other sites and expect AdSense to accept that. Using a paragraph from someone else's article (with references & authorization) is an acceptable method of including content you'd like to highlight or discuss from other sites. Just don't make your entire blog from non-original work.<br /><br /><br /><div style="color: #3d85c6;"><b>REJECTIONS FOR CONTENT</b></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHpEiI5PDLg7Pdn1TZAM9vGkuUC72jarwMN-xepRCvgHIvX8prFh2i5hTR5Q2YX9n5O3WpINNWnPp6ekxWT8yyOpfhe5pNbq2dFX3WWsfQQHhors97UKJEX96uqqncfJ0eH6Bm0njz4Ow/s1600/CopiedContentBustSmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHpEiI5PDLg7Pdn1TZAM9vGkuUC72jarwMN-xepRCvgHIvX8prFh2i5hTR5Q2YX9n5O3WpINNWnPp6ekxWT8yyOpfhe5pNbq2dFX3WWsfQQHhors97UKJEX96uqqncfJ0eH6Bm0njz4Ow/s320/CopiedContentBustSmall.jpg" width="320" /></a>Besides the active publishers being disabled for copied content, we are seeing more and more rejections from AdSense for sites that appear to have no original work. For those of us who write original articles, we can only see this as a good thing. It means that AdSense is beginning to value originality...or more likely that the AdWords advertisers (they pay the bills, so they do have a say) are beginning to demand their ads not appear on sites will a lot of copied stuff.<br /><br />But whatever the reason, AdSense is rejecting applications more frequently for sites whose contents are nothing more than articles copied from other sites. If you are having a problem getting an AdSense application accepted and you are submitting a site that you've filled up with work that you didn't create then you might try writing a blog full of your own articles, and submitting that instead.<br /><br /><div style="color: #3d85c6;"><b>References:</b></div><br /><a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769">Webmaster Guidelines</a><br /><a href="http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182">AdSense Program Policies</a>

Copied Content Syndrome (Or Why I Got Disabled/Rejected for Adsense)

In the last few weeks we've seen an increasing number of AdSense publishers in the forums with disabled accounts. While we see disabled ...

Read more »