A serious alternative to filling DMCAs?

1. 94

   SpaceShantyposted 9 years ago

   I'm sure many Hubbers here will be familiar with having their Hubs stolen and reproduced on other sites, losing views, losing revenue and potentially having their articles outranked by stolen content.
   
   Even after you find the offending site, finding the hosting company to file the DMCA with can be difficult. After some research I have found an alternative, just requesting Google deindex the offending site/s.
   
   Now this is not as good as getting the content taken down but it means it won't show up in search results. You will need to log in with a Google Account first https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools … pli=1&

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2. 97

   Glenn Stokposted 9 years ago

   First of all, you don't file a DMCA. You send a takedown notice based on the DMCA.
   
   This should be done only as the last resort. As per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the hosting company needs to obey your request to remove the offending copy of your content. The DMCA allows the other party to respond with their explanation and sue you for falsely having their copy taken down.
   
   But since your content was indeed stolen, you don't need to worry about getting sued. The thief will obviously not respond to the request of their host to provide a rebuttle.
   
   In the rare case where you deal with an unscrupulous hosting company who does not obey the DMCA and does not honor your takedown notice, you can request search engines to remove the index. But you'll need to get it removed from at least the top four search engines. Google, Bing and AOL.  Yahoo will be automatic once Bing is notified.
   
   So as you see, removing from Google alone is not as useful a solution as you think it is.

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   1. 94

      SpaceShantyposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Ok, yes I know 'file a DMCA' is not correct but that is what many people refer to it as.
      
      I would disagree that sending a takedown notice should be done as a last resort, most stolen content is re published by bots and scrappers so there is no point in wasting your time trying to contact the site owner asking them to take it down.  I have tried this and maybe 1 in 20 sites will actually take it down if you ask.
      
      I know there are other search engines apart from Google but most of my traffic comes from Google and if copied articles are outranking them then that is where I am going to focus my energies.
      
      I like the fact that you can just paste multiple URLs instead of filling out a separate notice for each site, when your work has been copied hundreds of times I don't really want to spend my weekend filling out the same form over and over again, knowing I will have to do it again next month.

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      1. 97

         Glenn Stokposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         You misunderstood me. I did not  mean to send a takedown notice as the last resort. I was referring to your statement where you said to just ask Google to remove it from their index. THAT is the last resort.
         
         By all means, the very first thing to do is send a takedown notice to any and all hosts of sites where stolen copies are found.
         
         You are right that the process is very easy if multiple copies of the same hub are stolen. You can use the same takedown notice, properly referrencing the DMCA, and just replace the URL of the stolen copy for each notice sent.

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