What if there's no way to file a DMCA Notice?

1. 73

   Thomas Swanposted 11 years ago

   So another "C" came up in the copied hubs section today. As usual someone had stolen one of my hubs.... words, pictures and all. I wanted to send them a DMCA complaint. However, there was:
   
   1. No "contact us" page or link.
   2. No email address listed on the "whois" entry.
   3. No way to leave a comment on the page. There was a box, but when I commented, nothing happened.
   4. I even tried to submit an article to the thief's site with the notice in, but that didn't work either. It just showed a loading icon for half an hour until I gave up.
   
   I've read about going to google and getting the page removed from search engines... or perhaps contacting their advertisers. I'm not overly sure what to do there. Has anybody done this?

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      classicalgeekposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      You can certainly contact their advertisers, and I would do so. Also, if they are providing false or incomplete information for their WHOIS, they can get their domain name cancelled. I just received this notice from my domain registrar:
      "(Under ICANN and ccTLD WHOIS rules and the terms of your registration agreement, PROVIDING FALSE CONTACT INFORMATION CAN BE GROUNDS FOR DOMAIN NAME CANCELLATION.) To review the ICANN policy, visit: http://www.icann.org/en/whois/wdrp-regi … htm."
      
      Keep going up the chain until you receive satisfaction.

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         Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks classicalgeek. Will do. It sounds like I could get the host to completely take their site down.

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2. 66

   relacheposted 11 years ago

   You can still file your notice of infringement, it's just you don't start with the actual content thief, you go higher up the chain from the get-go.
   
   If you can't hit the person posting the content, you file it with the service hosting the domain.  Got false info in the WhoIs?  Not a problem:  try whoishostingthis.com

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      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for this. I didn't know about whoishostingthis.com. I went there and it said the web host is "Cloudfare", which was strange because when I went to Cloudfare they explicitly said they're not a web hosting company! However, the whoishostingthis page also gave a link to better whois information. It seems like the `real' host might be godaddy.... I don't know if that sounds right.
      
      On the better whois page, there was also a godaddy email address listed for the registrar/admin, so I sent an email to that. On reflection, it's probably not an email address that the thief checks anyway, so I might have been better just going to the webhost. Would that be godaddy in this case? I'll give it a week though.

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3. 75

   MagKayeposted 11 years ago

   Having the same issue. Two of mine have had content stolen. I've tried contacting both site owners, through the sites, but neither of them have replied, nor taken my content down, as requested.
   I've sent a DMCA to the one site, and still no reaction.
   
   I also don't know what else to do.
   Good luck...

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      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Best of luck to you too MagKaye. I wish it wasn't completely down to content creators to chase these thieves down. We should be getting help from the search engines and web hosts.

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         MagKayeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         I know. It irks me, but frankly is at the bottom of list of things to worry about right now!
         I want to sort it out, but it's taking up time and energy.
         
         I hope you get yours sorted too. I'm going to try and go higher up the food chain and see if I get results.
         
         Urgh... Why does this have to happen? People can be such arseholes! (present company excepted, obviously :-) )

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            Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            I know how you feel. Every time I see my work copied and `claimed' as being written by another author, it makes me feel sick to be reminded that there are people like that in the world.

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   Nouveau Skepticposted 11 years ago

   Try WHOIS for the webmaster, then the webhost, then getting it deindexed from Google.  You can get them at some level most of the time.

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      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks Nouveau, I will try those.

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5. 63

   ologsinquitoposted 11 years ago

   WriterFox knows a lot more about this than I do. In the meantime, go to whois.com and enter the site URL. See if you can glean some more information. Sometimes contacting the hosting company or the domain registrar is faster.

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      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks ologsinquito. Yea, I will try that.

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6. 76

   creativegeniusposted 11 years ago

   I got a (C) too. The plagiarist resides in Indonesia, and so is his hosting service and registrar. No way to contact the idiot who stole my Hub content. I filed a DMCA with Google so the plagiarized copy won't appear in Google's search results (hopefully).

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      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Hi creativegenius, do you know where the form for doing this is? I know google have one for taking stuff off blogspot/blogger, but I didn't know there was one for search results? Do I select "web search" on their form to do this?

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   Marisa Wrightposted 11 years ago

   As others have said, the really nasty thieves will make sure you can't contact them - so don't waste your time trying.
   
   Find out the name of their hosting company and send the complaint directly to them.  Most hosting companies have a special form or special instructions you need to follow, so Google the name of the host and DMCA and you'll find their page on the subject.

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      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks Marisa. In this case, it was difficult for me to know the proper host. I guess Cloudfare is not the host... and it's actually godaddy (see above comment).

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         MagKayeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         I think the host company of the guy who plagiarized mine is also godaddy.
         The site is an Indian yoga site... So much for all that ohm-ing and spirituality!

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            Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Oh no, you've said the dreaded "I" word (Indian) lol. If you happen to mention that nearly all of the people who steal your content are from India, Pakistan, or that general area then you'll get called a racist by the self-righteous, politically-correct moralizers that invariably appear on these forums.
            
            Lol, seriously though, I don't know why this is, but there must be something about Indian culture that makes it less of a crime to plagiarize. I get the feeling that many of them don't think they're doing anything wrong. It would be interesting to know why this is from a psychological/anthropological standpoint. It looks to me like a culturally pervasive attitude, but I can't figure out why it's there.
            
            DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying that all Indian people have this attitude. FFS...

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               Buildrepsposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               It's not only a common thing in Asia. In Russia plagiarism is very common as well, they also don't feel they're doing something wrong, but since Russians (happily) don't speak as much English as Indians, it doesn't pop up as a problem currently...

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                  Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                  Yea, I've noticed it with Russians too, though I didn't think it was quite as bad.
                  
                  Another piece of evidence is the way in which a lot of Western music is plagiarized and culturally `augmented'' into Indian-style music. Having listened to quite a bit of modern Hindi music, I've noticed a lot of Western melodies being incorporated in this way. Perhaps the reverse is true to some extent as well. Then, there's the way in which Western cars and brands are copied in China... I can't remember the specifics, but it was quite funny when I watched it on Top Gear.
                  
                  From my cultural psychology studies, the only difference between cultures of real note was how Asian cultures are more socially-oriented and collectivist when compared with individualist Western cultures. This may provide a greater attitude that things in their social sphere are "shared" and free to use... which could make plagiarism more prolific when that social sphere is expanded via the internet. That's just speculation though.

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               MagKayeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               Oh boy... I had no idea it could potentially lead to that can of worms!
               But it is what it is... An Indian yoga site has copied my stuff.
               Let the chips fall where they may... ;-)

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   Buildrepsposted 11 years ago

   It is indeed unpleasant to notice the 'c' in your list. A few weeks ago I contacted a website with a contact possibility, but even this doesn't seem to work. You can try to contact the hosting provider, like Relache suggested. I think this is the best suggestion so far.
   
   Thomas, I like to see the positive side of this aping behaviour, that your content is worth the effort to copy it and to publish somewhere else. I expect that Google is able to distinct the original content of the copied content and expresses that in the search rankings.

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      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks buildreps. I also think google is able to tell the difference... some of the time. On a couple of occasions, a stolen copy of one of my hubs has outranked me. This was due to higher traffic caused by the thieves sharing the copies all over reddit, google+, and facebook. I was utterly mortified that google was helping them.
      
      In those cases, the copied versions were really hurting my original article, though I wonder if this is always the case.

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   Organised Kaosposted 11 years ago

   I've had about 6 hubs completely scraped - adds and all. So I followed hub-pages procedures and used their standard letter, forwarding a request to have content removed.
   Received a reply from Viral Nova the next day, whom said they too were victims and could do nothing about it.
   Bummer. Really, I don't have the time to chase this so have just had to get over it.
   My views and eBay/amazon sales haven't been effected so until an address is provided by hub-pages, its just too bad I guess.

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   1. 73

      Thomas Swanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I think this is a common complaint. Search engines and web hosts should do a lot more to crack down on copyright thieves. It shouldn't be up to content creators to tell multinational companies to stop thieves from using their services. If they're so concerned about torrent-sharing sites like pirate bay (or whetever they're called), then what is the difference between that platform and their own? Both allow thieves to promote and propagate copied content.

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