I never thought someone would copy my content
Through the past month, I have undergone a lot of agony because I discovered that a number of my posts have been copied as-is by at least two different blog owners and posted on their blogs.
I left comments on their blogs and I also tried to contact them but to no avail. I didn’t receive any responses and nor was my content removed from these blogs. Eventually, I had to resort to complaining, and since these blogs were hosted on Wordpress.com, I found out that they have a form dedicated for lodging reports such as these. For reporting any spam blogs on wordpress.com you should visit the Report Spam page. So, I lodged two spam reports (one for each blog) and listed the URLs from my blog which were copied and the URLs to which they were copied.
Within a couple of days both blogs were made inactive (and they still are) and I received a mail informing me of this action. I felt vindicated. However, the story didn’t stop there.
One of these blog owners decided to move to a hosting provider and hosted his own blog. What’s more, he again put up content which had posts from my blog copied as is. So once again I left comments asking him to remove the content from his blog. Incidentally, I noticed that almost all his posts were copies from some blog or another. Anyway, I was pretty concerned about my content. So, I discovered the hosting provider this blog was using and sent an email to their abuse department (which directed me to their legal department). The legal department came back and said that my complaint was not in the correct format to be filed as a DMCA complaint, and so has not been entertained.
So, I found out what their desired format was (it required certain information, certain declarations, and my signature) and sent it to their lawyers. Within a couple of days of this, all access to this blog was denied. So, now here I am, finally relieved that my content is no longer stolen.
This experience however showed how possessive an author can be of the content that he/she has written.
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July 13th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
gee! that must have been hard mate . Its very tough to prevent and tackle plagiarism in this cyberspace of infinite URLs. those hosts rarely care to reply in such matters, You were lucky though,
July 13th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Well, yes… i had tried to get the site unindexed from Google as well but I am still to receive a reply from them.
July 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Oh, thats so cool. I routinely find my content being used by spam bloggers, most of them on their own domain. I will keep your story in mind next time.
July 14th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Most of them rely on the blogger forgetting about the theft. So good on you to have persisted.
Can you also share the ‘format’ they want complaints in? Thanks.
July 14th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Sure Shefaly, here you go: http://blog.gadodia.net/Planet-Copyright-Infringement.pdf
This was the format the hosting provider asked me to send it in.
Hope that helped…