http://www.digiprove.com

if you’re worried about your work getting stolen online, these guys provide a service for proving ownership of any type of creative work…worth taking a look at anyway!

Sunita

Thanks for bringing this up.

A few months back I had an RSS tool running that picked up a story and reran it without checking with the original author. He tried to contact me but the email he has was invalid so he sent a DMCA email to my hosting company who promptly took down my web site … powerful stuff.

The point is, taking the time to read about your options is important.

I received an email from a woman claiming I had nude photos of her, stolen from her website, on mine. I figured it was some weird form of spam and ignored it. The next day I had another message this one asking for my attorney’s contact information as I failed to take down the photos. Just to be sure I checked my paltry website. No nude photos. I emailed her back saying she had the wrong person.

The next day I had an email from someone else who claimed to be this woman’s attorney. I so wish I had saved this email. Imagine if a gynecologist and a lawyer got together and wrote an email describing to the Nth detail every image. I’ll keep this family-friendly, but from the descriptions it was a very raunchy site. And the strict use of medical terms made the email even more humorous.

My response was short. I didn’t appreciate the email and unless he could connect me to the website in question I would consider the matter closed. I never heard from either again.

Strange.

I one case there was a guy ripping off the content of a lot of experts like me. He would post the first few paragraphs of an article, then require payment to get a link to the actual article. He was taking advantage of people who weren’t very good at Google, and this didn’t sit well with me, because I had posted my pages for free. He also made it look like the experts were writing content exclusively for him.

This guy was adamant that he was in the right, but I got ahold of the copyright law, and there it states that the copyright holder has the right to control how the content is copied. Since he was copying part of my text, and his use could not be regarded as fair use, he finally agreed to remove my content. But he persists in stealing work of other people. Unfortunately I think he finds new experts to rip off faster than the current experts wise up and get him to cease and desist.

I’m going to suggest that you take an important step FIRST (especially if you are self-employed)…

Assess the cost of the theft, the cost of “fixing” it, and the benefit of “fixing” it.

Half of the time, content theft is by someone who doesn’t know any better (a quick polite email can fix this– low cost!). The other half, it’s deliberate by someone who might not even speak the same language as you do. In this case, the cost to fix it is very high.

In EITHER case, I’m not sure the ROI on the time it takes is worth much more than a quick form email.

I’ve been ripped off as well, from scraper sites to clients who used work which they didn’t pay for. Were you successful in stopping your thieves?

This was helpful. I’ve had my work ripped off since I started, and this post was a good starting point to stop it.