FIGHTING ONLINE PLAGIARISM

- By RAHUL KRISHAN AHUJA

DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement – Overview & Sample Template

If you discover your content published illegally on another website without permission or attribution, the first step is to send a polite email to the owner of the website.

How to Find Email Addresses of People Who Plagiarize Content

Content plagiarism is a serious concern on the Internet.

You spent an entire day to get that perfect picture from your Nikon D80 DSLR camera only to realize that hour later, some lesser-known websites , blogs, pages have reprinted your pictures without giving you any credit.

To get your content removed from the another website, the first step (that works in 99% of the cases) is to send a friendly email to the owner of that site/page.

But sometimes finding the email address of the person, who ripped off your content, may be the toughest part.

Following are some indirect tricks to help you locate email addresses of offenders.

Step 1. If the offending site is self hosted, you are very likely to find the email address of the website owner through the public whois database. I prefer who.is for quick retrieval of website registry information.

Step 1(a). If the website is self hosted but the whois information is private, try the following query on Google (replace abc with the actual site address)

abc.com -inurl:abc.com - This might show up some real email addresses for that domain.

Step 2. If the site is hosted on Blogger, WordPress or other blogging platforms, leave a comment in any of the blog posts. Most bloggers generally read and respond to user comments.

Step 3. Now the trickiest part - there's no "Contact Us" form on the website and there's place for you to write comments. Well, don't give up yet because you still have good options:

3(a). Use Technorati or Google Blog search to find other sites / blogs linking to that offending site. It's quite possible that the offender may be maintaining multiple websites that are cross-linked for maximum Google Juice. There are chances that contact information is available on one of his/her legit sites.

3(b). If the person is blogging under an alias (say “coolstranger4u") - search for that term on Google. It's very likely that he has used the same alias when registering on other web forums and social networking websites.

When you get hold of his public profile on some site like Digg, MyBlogLog or say facebook forums, look for the IM aliases. If his YIM! is abc, you know that an email addressed to abc@yahoo.com will, very likely, land in his inbox.

Alternatively, most web forums allow Private Messaging. Sign up for that forum yourself and send a private message / email. That may be the last resort.

You can flood his facebook page, he will hide/ban you again and again, but that really won’t make a difference.

Keep doing it and message the most frequent users of the page and ask them to help.

Never quit - I know it takes some effort to track down the plagiarists but that should not deter you from actively pursuing your case.

Remember that search engines, including Google, still have issues figuring out the original source of web documents.

If the website owner fails to respond to your email requesting removal of plagiarized content, it may be time for you to send a formal DMCA letter to his web hosting company and also to his advertising partner(s) (like Google Adsense / facebook ads manager) that are helping him monetize content which is actually owned by you.

While web hosting firms and online advertising companies will immediately comply to your requests, they will also ask you to send them DMCA notices in a proper format with all the necessary details and proof.

Let's take a fictional case - Mr. Karan Seth of www.myphoto.com finds his content on another website called www. photosteal.com. Following is a Sample DMCA Notice that Karan can submit to the web host of photocopy.com and also to Google.

FORMAL DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement

Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement

The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on www.myphoto.com/page1.html and www. myphoto.com/page2.html

The URLs where our copyrighted material is located include www.photocopy.com/abc.html and www.photocopy.com/xyz.com

You can reach me at myemail@myphoto.com for further information or clarification. My phone number is +91-9324612905 and my mailing address is Karan Seth, 16/729 Sion East, Mumbai : 400 037.

The email address of the website owner, who has reprinted our content illegally, is vishal@photocopy.com.

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Karan SethSeptember 11, 2010 [14:50]

If your DMCA Notification letter meets all the requirements, the web host will expeditiously delete (or ask the customer to remove) that material.

While most web hosting companies will accept your DMCA notices via email, Google (for Blogger and Adsense) requires you to snail mail or fax the DMCA document with your signatures.

As a workaround, you can take a picture of your signature and paste that as in image in the Word Processor. Then you fax the document to Google DMCA department via Skype,Email or online.

Please Note

Please review the websites DMCA procedures which follow the OCILLA.

Also note, the sworn statements and all other information listed on their DMCA page are not only required but mandatory for any DMCA report.

This will allow you to specifically identify the intellectual property that you own and is being infringed upon, which is required by law.

There are many verified third party DMCA/COPYRIGHT agencies who act on behalf of the intellectual property holders who can verify and submit these claims on behalf of the intellectual property owners.

This will insure that legally, the intellectual property owner and the ISP is protected in the event of an account termination.

Everything else fails - Complain to the Site Advertisers

In most circumstances, the thief will be planning to monetize your content using advertising from Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network or some other service.

Once he sets up advertising on his site, your job get even easier - just complain to them and immediately, the ads will be pulled off from the offending site.

IMPORTANT Bibliography

The Best Online Tools To Help You Know Everything About Web Sites :::: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/best-online-tools-for-webmasters-know-everything-about-websites/2744/

How to Find the name of Web Hosting Company from the Site URL::: http://labnol.blogspot.in/2007/07/how-to-find-name-of-web-hosting-company.html

SoftLayer DMCA information http://www.softlayer.com/dmca.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCILLA see section 2 - 2.1 take-down example.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html see section 512 -3 Elements of notification

Get In Touch

Rahul Krishan AhujaIPR and Internet consultant

Cyber Forensics AnalystCyber Crime Investigator

CEOAdEventureZ

022-2409335109324612905

rahul@adeventurez.comwww.adeventurez.com

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