I was pretty sure I wrote about this in the past, but either my search function is not working properly or I am going senile. Anyway, what does one do when they find that someone ripped off their content and is now ranking in the search engines from your hard work?
It happens all the time for content writers. I personally have stopped looking to see if people were ripping my stuff off, it is just too time consuming. But if I stumble across one of these content thieves, I handle it in the following fashion.
(1) Take screen captures of the pages (2) Download Google/Yahoo/SE cache as proof (if available) (3) Document whois information and figure out who the ISP is (4) Call or Email the number (if any) listed on the contact us page (5) If no response in a few days, send an email to the ISP with the subject Digital Millennium Copyright Act Copyright Infringement with the proof listed above. I ask them to take down the pages that were stolen, providing the file names and paths. (6) Send email/fax to the search engines - Google's DMCA - Yahoo's Copyright Infringement & Yahoo's Page Deletion Process - Ask Jeeves TOS, scroll down and you will see "Copyrights and Copyright Agent" section with a form.
Actually, just found this excellent page on sending dmca notifications to search engines.
There is this new tool that actually is in beta right now. It's named Article Guard and its purpose is to seek out these content thieves. When the final product is live, I will make sure to post about it. Seems like a great tool.
