To protect the content on the websites as well as blogs is so important today, because that's something about the traffic, hence the revenue.

    One thing is about how to find out the illegal copies of the original content, but another thing is about what can you do with it. If you are a  big company, you can ask lawyers to deal with content stealers, but what about if you are a very small player?

    A blog called DoshDosh, which is a website about how to make money from Internet, i.e. Adsense. It has a copyright policy, and what will the owner do with the content stealer. I think that is very interesting.

http://www.doshdosh.com/copyright-regulations/

Cheers

 

SamZ - great example.
Love how he describes exactly what to expect if you copyright his work.
Best of all he uses plain language, so even the thickest copyright thief can understand the consequences (if he/she reads them of course).
Also great how he gives them 1 warning before proceeding as a pissed off blogger (as he puts it).
Well worth the read if you haven't already.

Good point, Sam...You might not be able to stop people from unauthorized use of your content, but you can make it exceedingly clear what you will do to them if they do it! Thanks for bringing this tool to my attention, Dan. I will check it out. I've found word-for-word copies of my blog posts in some unexpected places, so anything to help people keep track of that use is welcome!

Where can you go to actually punish them.

I find my blog posts somewhat "rewritten" and also with links giving me some credit...

what part is stealing and what part is fair use if they give the author credit.

Sorting all of that out is difficult. Any copyright Gooruze around here? Most do say something like "Vanessa wrote a great post about this topic..." which I think is legal because they are at least giving credit, but I've also found blogs using my content word-for-word with no attribution, but a link for more at the bottom that goes directly to my original post. Is that legal?

Hi Vanessa,

    I don't think that is fair use. As I showed the DoshDosh site, the owner made it very clear that you can ONLY take one paragraph to another site, and a link targeted to the original article.

    So, your situation is a kind of a copy for everything, then a link at the bottom. No matter whether you have got the credit, but you lose the traffic, because the reader has already read the whole article elsewhere.

That's another good point, Sam. I would be interested in hearing from others who have had this experience and what if anything they did about it.

people can quote your work and provide a link to you. However by quoting, I do not mean copying. Maybe they quote a sentence or a paragraph, but certainly no where near the majority of your post/article etc.

I've been wanting to learn more about copyright issues because one of our clients had an image and description of a product she sells copied on another site. I plan to strengthen our own copyright compliance statement and write a stronger statement about what steps we will take if we discover copyright infringement, using the DoshDosh site as a good example. that's a good first step at least. Thanks everyone!

I signed up with Attributor.com. I'm at the level of their "small publisher's package" at under 50 posts a month. They don't launch that package until sometime in 2008, but this looks like a great service and for anyone with a lot of content to monitor they have a large publisher's package available since November 5. Thanks again for announcing this, Dan!