Help with Stolen Hub

1. 94

   ktrappposted 12 years ago

   I realized today that one of my hubs has been copied and re-published on two different websites.
   
   I was looking at my Google Analytics and noticed someone had searched on a complete sentence or two from one of my hubs. When I searched the sentence on Google myself I saw the other websites that copied by hub word-for-word. I also checked it in copyscape and those two websites came up there, as well.
   
   This is what I have done so far:
   
   (1) I have sent a DCMA complaint email to both websites(friendskorner.com and oyepakistan.com). I looked up both website contacts in Whois database since both websites only had contact forms, not email addresses and got the site owners' email addresses that way.
   
   (2) I filed a copyright infringement complaint with Google for both websites.
   
   
   Is there anything else I should do?
   
   Does anyone know a more systematic way of checking our hubs for copyright infringement? It seems crazy to just randomly run URLs through copyscape or similar tools. And this has been such an incredible waste of my time today.

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   1. 0

      Aunt Mollieposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      This is being discussed on this forum thread:
      http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/88738?p … ost1939069

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2. 56

   Dame Scribeposted 12 years ago

   There are probably services which offer to check for you if you don't mind paying their fee maybe more experienced HP authors may have better suggestions or ideas, sorry I'm not much help.

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3. 37

   ChristinSposted 12 years ago

   Sorry that happened to you - I've had it happen to me too with my website content.  One woman even stole the entire content of my homepage and tried to pass herself off as me on an "Experts" website.  It's very frustrating and I totally feel for you.
   
   The Cease and Desist and report to Google are both good steps.  You can also find out who their webhost is if they are not compliant via the whois search and take your complaint directly to their webhost who may drop them. 
   
   You have an easier time of this with sites that are US based.  Unfortunately the copyright laws are more difficult to enforce with foreign websites and they know it - that's why they behave this way.
   
   I do run copyscape on my content periodically, particularly if I notice a traffic drop etc.  I also know you can pay for services that monitor your content for you.  I have not opted to do this yet, but as my portfolio of websites and articles gets too large to manage will consider doing so. 
   
   I'm definitely following this forum topic too to see if anyone has other ideas for this.

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   1. 94

      ktrappposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks Christin. One of the site's registrants (friendskorner - what a misnomer that is) is in New Jersey, but I think he might be hosting the site himself.
      
      The second site's registrant (oyepakistan) is in Pakistan but it looks like the host's servers are in the UK.
      
      It is sickening. One of them has had 30 replies to MY content. The hub of mine in question was getting quite a bit of traffic from stumbleupon. I didn't think much of it when the stumbleupon traffic went away, since that is sort of how that works, but now I notice that the timing of my traffic loss is about the same time my hub was copied.
      
      Thanks for all your helpful information!

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4. 71

   Howard S.posted 12 years ago

   The hubber Edweirdo wrote an extremely helpful program that either runs a check like Copyscape or monitors periodically and notifies you whenever something has been copied. He offered it free on a limited basis or for something like $5 per month if you had more than 50 hubs or so. He ported it to at least three browsers. I never got a chance to use it before he stopped hosting the service.
   
   What happened was that many power users left HubPages at a point when HubPages was still casting about for a solution to Panda. It was fees from those power users that had been supporting his server fees. It became uneconomical for him to continue, so he pulled the plug.
   
   I would dearly like to see his service resurrected, by him or by someone else buying the rights from him. At some point in time--perhaps already--hubbers wanting such a service will reach critical mass again. Changing the fee structure might help, too. Either increasing the fee or adding a third tier. Free entry level would have to remain. Edwierdo is not easy to contact--I think he has email turned off. I tried communicating all this to him through a comment on his personal website, but never heard anything.

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   1. 94

      ktrappposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      HOWARD!!! I'm so glad to hear from you. I was actually thinking about emailing you this week to see if all is ok since you dropped off the face of the earth, or the face of HubPages anyway, for a couple months.
      
      And it is this kind of valuable advice of yours that I have missed. Edweirdo had a great idea and it really is too bad that some of those "power" hubbers didn't stick around to wait out the Panda storm. Anyway, my husband is a programmer, and I think I am going to ask him about running some sort of automatic utility that compares the content of submitted URLs against the web on some sort of periodic basis. I am not sure if he would have time, but it would be such a valuable tool.
      
      It's good to see you back.

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5. 75

   Wesman Todd Shawposted 12 years ago

   Everything you need is right here:
   
   http://support.google.com/bin/static.py … page=ts.cs
   
   Oh sorry, didn't see that you'd already done that.  Google will get back to you.
   
   I never check for stolen stuff, but folks tend to tell me about it when mine are stolen.  Last time I had an issue it was taken care of within just thirty hours, and Google mailed me to let me know.
   
   I'm told it can take two weeks sometimes though.

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6. 71

   Howard S.posted 12 years ago

   HP will flag duplicated content, but it's obvious that they either don't catch it all or that it takes quite awhile for them to recrawl content that previously passed OK. I don't want to waste time looking for trouble unless I know it's there.
   
   As to my absence: at this point, I'm completely unmotivated to spend time on HP until Google stops jerking me around. They like me for a week or two and then dislike me for a week or two. By dislike, I mean that I got 9 pageviews in the past 24 hrs total for all hubs. The last time they liked me was for 5 days. I need stability before I know what to improve, and I need an audience before I'll write more. My wife's account has not seen this effect, so I may just spend time with SEO and editing of her hubs.

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7. 94

   ktrappposted 12 years ago

   Here's an update on my stolen hub situation.
   
   - Google removed the two offending websites from their search results after I filed a DMCA complaint. This happened in less than 48 hours.
   
   - Both websites removed my content after I emailed a DMCA complaint to the admin. contacts that I got from the whois database. This took several days.
   
   - The traffic to my hub has at least tripled and the hub has moved up to the first position in Google results.

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8. 60

   BakingBread-101posted 12 years ago

   There is a company called Tynt that I used on my website; however, I do not know if it works for hub pages.

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9. 76

   imatellmuvaposted 12 years ago

   The same thing happened to one of my hubs with an author at Wordpress. I filed the DMCA report with them, and opted not to send an email request directly to the author as suggested at the Wordpress site.
   
   I considered that if this person had the audacity to spin my hub as his own, what would he do once he had my email address.
   
   The spinned article and the author was gone within hours. As suggested by a fellow hubber, I started using Google Alerts. It allows you to enter context from your hubs. You will receive alerts if there is any duplication of content.
   
   Select a statement or verse that will unlikely be duplicated. I hope this helps.

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   1. 94

      ktrappposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Believe me, I thought long and hard about sending a complaint via email to the sites that copied my hub. I actually did not send the email directly to the author, though, but sent it to the admin of the domain. I guess that would be the equivalent of you filing it with Wordpress and not the author.
      
      I am just glad it is resolved. But it really is maddening.
      
      I just took a look at Google alerts. That is a really interesting idea. It doesn't look like finding copies of web content is its intended purpose, but it seems like a good idea. Thanks for letting me know about this. I am going to give it a try.

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10. 75

    Richieb799posted 12 years ago

    I had this problem over Christmas, if you have emailed the site owners give them time to respond(24hours), they might see it and be worried and take it down quickly.  If you have already filed DMCA compliants with the Hosting Providers that is good as well, don't wait for a response from the site owner.
    
    My problem was over in 1-2 days because the site owner emailed back with an apology, maybe he was worried when his hosting company emailed him...

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11. 0

    Aunt Mollieposted 12 years ago

    Here's a Hub that was just published about everything to do if your content is stolen.  It includes all of the contact information you need:
    http://writerfox.hubpages.com/hub/Content-Theft

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    1. 94

       ktrappposted 12 years agoin reply to this

       That is an excellent hub. Thanks for sharing the link.

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12. 94

    ktrappposted 12 years ago

    I was just looking at the stats for my stolen hub that is now no longer copied anywhere and traffic has more than quadrupled since the copies were removed from the two sites and from google results.
    
    This graph illustrates why copied content is so bad!
    
    
    
    The tan traffic represents a lot of traffic I got from Stumbleupon (not high quality traffic though). Right when the Stumbleupon traffic ends dramatically is about the exact time I can see my hub was posted on two other websites. I have no idea if this is a cause and effect relationship or just coincidence.
    
    I didn't know it was copied for some time and just figured the hub dropped off Stumbleupon as happens. It still got traffic from Google every day, but the dramatic increase in Google traffic (red) only occurs right after the offenders were removed from Google and both offenders deleted MY content from their websites.

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