I received some rather disturbing news earlier this week when my friend, MJ, contacted me to let me know that the photography article he wrote for My Several Worlds had been copied in its entirety and was being used on another website!
A quick visit to the offending website confirmed that not only MJ’s article had been stolen. This noob had ripped off my entire website! All of my photos and full articles had been posted without credit on this site. Our engagement photos, my health updates, my travel posts, absolutely everything. Even my categories had been copied. I was stunned.
This was my first real introduction into the world of spamming and to be honest, I had no idea where to start with getting my content removed from someone’s site. I felt completely violated. I don’t mind if people want to use my content, provided they ask permission and they link back to My Several Worlds and give me photo credit. Unfortunately, the Internet makes it really easy to rip things off. One can simply cut and paste entire web pages and claim it as their own with a few minor adjustments.
I’m not going to name the website because I don’t want to drive any more traffic to them, but let me tell you, I was pissed. I immediately posted about it on Twitter and heard back from a few Twitter friends within minutes. They recommended checking out CopyScape to search for copies of my site on the Internet. While I was at it, I took the time to go over CopyScape with a fine tooth comb. In addition to learning how to respond to plagiarism, I also got a crash course on preventing plagiarism.
I took four major steps.
1. I contacted the owner of the website with a polite message asking for the stolen content to be removed immediately.
2. Then I used a Whois service to find out who the web hosting company was (GoDaddy) and contacted them to let them know that one of their customers was abusing their terms of agreement by posting stolen content.
3. Then I went through the website and found a few other bloggers who had had been ripped off. I got in contact with them to let them know about my intent to have my material removed from the site.
4. Finally I filed a notice with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which results in informing search engines like Google to have the offending site removed from their search results.
Surprisingly, these four steps only took about thirty minutes of my time and I learned a valuable lesson.
I received my reward this morning when I learned that the offending account has been suspended. Success! Spammers beware. Your craft will not be tolerated in any of my worlds.
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Your article contains some excellent advice about how to deal with this problem. Hopefully some more people can follow these steps and rid the internet of this terrible scourge.
i once had to threaten a guy by reading his address over the phone to him, and offering to make a “personal” visit. i could hear him typing in the background for a few seconds before he announced that everything was “fixed” lol.
good work Carrie. let this be a lesson to abusers!
Hi David,
Honestly, when I saw what had happened, I was filled with dread. I didn’t think that any action I took would result in success, so I was really surprised to find out that the whole process was quite easy. I think if more people knew about it, there might be less abuse to deal with. I just hope it doesn’t happen again, and if it does, I will play hardball.
MJ,
I can just hear you making that call….I bet your solution was way quicker than mine!
hey gt,
There is another utility that will be coming on-line soon that you may be interested in. It’s a new web site called http://tineye.com/login
Tineye is a search engine for pictures. What makes it different is that it does a fingerprint-like comparison of the actual content inside the photo when it does the search.
Tineye doesn’t depend on the “text” tagged information of a picture to determine a match.
You scan and submit a picture that you are searching for and it will even find close matches on the web that are cropped.
Searches are also grouped with the closest matches first in the results list.
So if you are looking to see if someone is stealing your photos, this website may be something to look into. Check it out, and sign up to get on the waiting list for the beta test.
ttyl
~sjr
hey gt,
You might be interested in this. Get yourself on the waiting list as a beta tester over at http://tineye.com/login
It’s a search engine for photo’s that does things a bit differently.
Tineye doesn’t depend on the typed-in “text tagged description” information for a photo to determine a match. Tineye compares photos by looking at the actual content instead, doing fingerprint-like matching.
It will even find modified versions, like if someone tries to steal and re-crop a picture and use it.
So check it out and get on the waiting list.
ttyl
~Sjr
Dayum, remind me never to piss you off! Good one and good info. Sad in a day of Creative Commons and fairly open Net that people still do stuff like that.
Nice work, Carrie. The internet is a breeding ground for scoundrels and thieves. I’ll pass along your advice (and this post) when asked about this problems by friends.
SJR,
As ever, you are a fountain of information. I’m so glad you found me here! Just signed up for Tineye and will give it a whirl. It looks promising. I’ve been looking into watermarking my photos as well, but I just haven’t had the time.
I don’t mind sharing my content at all. I consider it an honor if someone likes my work enough to want to re-use it, but I sure mind if someone rips of my content and claims it as their own.
Thanks for the information. Hope you’re gearing up for a great weekend!
Hiya Mark,
Behind this angelic facade lies the heart of a warrior and the temper of a grizzly bear! GROWL. I don’t get angry often but when I do, I’m better off hiding away. It’s not pretty. ;-P
Hey Stevo,
Thanks. I hope it works as well the next time — if there is a next time.
[...] did some research and took actions. I suggest everyone read her post on how she solved the problem and busted the [...]
I had something similar happen, although not with my entire website. I discovered this site as a result, it was very instructive:
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/
Good on you for chasing it down. My site got hacked a few weeks ago and I had to redo everything after 1200 files got damaged.
Good job, Carrie. I haven’t found any complete pages from my website in a long time, but it doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Hi Wanda,
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had similar problems. Thanks for sharing your link with us. What steps did you take to correct the situation? Were you successful?
Thanks for stopping by!
Craig,
That’s terrible! Were you able to get everything fixed? What steps did you take? I’m terrified this is going to happen to me. I’ve started looking into how to protect my site, but I really have no idea what I’d do if My Several Worlds was hacked.
RT,
I hope it doesn’t happen again either. I don’t mind if people want to use a bit of my content, but when I saw our engagement photos on a website for designer toys, I blew a gasket. What is the point of doing something like this? It just doesn’t make sense.
It seems to be fixed now. The whole site needed to be taken down and done over from scratch, which is why it looks different now. There’s still a few tweaks that I should do, and some things that should be added but I’m not sure if I can be bothered – updating the site is not a particularly high priority at the moment because I’m considering having a static gallery site only.
I’ve noticed a couple of sites that copy every single post I make in the “investing category” of my blog. Even more obnoxiously, some sites have put pop-up ads on content from my RSS feeds!
I’ve been pretty laid back about it all, though. I guess for people who have never illegally download music, never read copyrighted books on scribd and never watched music videos on youtube it would be different. For me, though, it would probably take someone selling my content to provoke a legal response.
Hey Carrie,
Sorry for the double post before. I got an error from the server and it told me to try again and so I did. :/
So wait..you really don’t know what you’d do if you where to get hacked?…backups baby…you’re doing backups ..right?
You’re using WordPress CMS ? If so try here http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups#Backing_Up_Your_WordPress_Site
If you need help or have question feel free to email me. Oh and check with your host provider too, they may be doing backups for you on their maintenance schedule already or at least provide you with software for you to it..
ttyl
~Sjr
Craig,
That’s terrible. I’m so sorry to hear it, but I have to say, your new site looks AWESOME! I like it when something good comes out of something bad.
Ola Mark! I can’t believe it! I finally got you off my spam list. It’s taken ages, and I just want to say thanks for persevering with your comments.
I guess everyone is different. I wouldn’t have been bothered with one of two posts, since the site in question was after some of my vinyl toy articles, but to rip off someone’s entire site is something else, and when I saw MJ’s article and our engagement photos up, I just lost it. I’m all for sharing, provided people link back and let me know what’s up. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
SJR,
I left the double post up because they were slightly different and raised some really great points. Yep. I’m backing up, but I’m still so new at this game, I think I’d freak out of anything happened. I’m lucky to have some mighty blogger friends here who could lend a helping hand if something like this happened, and now it looks like I can add you to that list too!
Thanks for the advice and links.
Hi Carrie, that must have been really frustrating (especially having your faces advertising a product without your knowledge).
. Our marketing department negotiated with them and they’re hosted by us now (and paying for it).
I’m part of the webmaster team in a multinational, and we have branches in every country. Our European national branches can choose to have their websites designed and hosted by us (the mothership). We have most of them under our wings now, but 2 years ago we discovered that a couple of countries had just ripped the entire design and content of our sites, right down to the statistics cookies (so we were even tracking their visitors). They were in the same company as us, but didn’t want to pay the IT costs so just had the site copied by an intern. I must admit they did a pretty good job
Another problem we face are domain names, if you put a typo in one of our urls (or leave out the dot between ‘www’ and the domain) you often arrive on sites selling our products – fake or secondhand – or even porn.
I sometimes use your pictures as a wallpaper for my desktop, so I hope the watermarks won’t be too obtrusive – but I understand why you want to put them there.
Hi Kim,
Yep. Super frustrating! What really put me over the edge was seeing our wedding photos up on a site for ‘toy’ designs. WTF?
I admit, I’ve never even thought about what companies do when they are ripped off. Out of house is bad enough, but when it’s inhouse, it seems much worse. I’m glad you guys were able to bring everyone together.
The watermarking won’t happen for awhile yet. I just don’t have the time. And of course, I’ll try to keep it casual and understated so that it doesn’t draw from the photos. What a compliment though. No one’s ever told me they use my photos as wallpaper. Thanks very much for thinking they’re good enough!