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Joined: Sep 2004
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I have this tendency to get a bit obsessed when someone prods me <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I spent months and months researching the Mass 3rd Infantry (a civil war unit) because my son's ancestor was in it. I then put a summary of all my research (lots of driving around etc) up on the web and was really happy when people wrote me thanking me for my hard work and for putting it on line free.

Tonight I was searching for Austrian rifles to get more info on them - it's what that unit used - and I found to my surprise that another website had stolen my entire history content and posted it as their own, complete with their own copywrite statement! Not only that, but he stole content from SEVERAL other websites of other units. I searched the web and none of this content was anywhere else. The only place he could have gotten it from was our site.

I wrote him and asked him to remove it. If he'd at least credited me I wouldn't have minded as much. But he was claiming HE did all that work.

He wrote back and said in essence "everybody steals, it's not a big deal" and was upset that I said he'd stolen it! He said, what if he got it with permission from another webpage and not mine? Well, there weren't any other webpages on the entire web that had my content, and when I pressed him for this other website so I could go talk to them, I never got an answer. He said he runs a web hosting company and he finds his clients' stuff stolen all the time. So if he's upset about his clients' material being stolen, shouldn't he think twice about then turning around and putting stolen content on his site?

It just really riled me first that he did it, and then second that he could tell me that 'stealing is normal' and that *I* was wrong for accusing him! He said he'd be sure to mention on his webpage that I was unpleasant and not allowing him to show my content.

I ghost wrote this article on the topic, on how to track down stolen content -

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art5940.asp

I know in actuality it happens VERY rarely, because I do look occasionally for my content, and I have thousands of pages on the web. Only rarely do I find it elsewhere and usually it's a kid's site where they want a "cool page" and don't know how to write it themselves. That at least I can understand. But a grown adult making a page about "my civil war ancestors" stealing content instead of saying "go here to learn more about this unit" baffles me.

And it wasn't just a paragraph, it was pages and pages.

What are your experiences in this area?


P. Pureheart
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I run a webring of websites for Peace Corps Volunteers. I found one of my pictures from Kenya on another PCV's website. He was heading off the Kenya for his training & service. I did mention that he had my photo on his site & I told him that he could 'borrow' it until he came back and had one of his own to replace it with. Which reminds me - he should be back in the next few months... <img src="/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

I've never really checked around to see if any of my content has been taken. I probably should do a few searches...

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Stolen web content sucks.... 'nuff said. <img src="/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />

For my day job, the main problem is people lifting images from our web site, to use for auctioning our label clothing used on eBay. Fortunately, eBay has a program where the company registered as an intellectual property owner. Any auction where I find they lifted one of our pics, I get to write to eBay and they shut down the auction, no questions asked on their part.

For my personal site, I can't track if someone lifts the material and serves it from their own server, HOWEVER, if someone links from my site to a BBS, and are using my server to host the content remotely, my log files show that. Usually all I do is change the image name, delete the old version, upload the new one, and that person is left with a permanent broken link to their BBS.

Other than that, for any picture that seems "hot" or has the potential for being pirated, I add my site URL in photoshop somewhere right in the middle of the pic where it can't just be cropped off.

As for text info, unless you have registered the document with the copyright office, it's a "I said, they said" arguement. My advice, don't support bad web ethics with revenge by more bad web ethics. If someone is really stealing your content, you must either go over their heads to the actual ISP providing them with hosting and threaten legal action. That will usually get the major offenders shut down. If you don't have resources available for such actions, you're pretty much stuck like the rest of us.

- Rae

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I wrote an article about Halloween from a Christian perspective and it was posted on witchvox.com. They even included my email. i recieved all kinds of email about who did i think i was posting something at witchvox.com so anti-pagan! I answered all my email nicely and let everyone know that emailed me that I didn't post my article there and directed them back to my site.

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Grrr.... this really makes me mad! First, I have a problem with copyright infringement anyway. It's one of my 'buttons', as my husband would say. As a jewely designer, it makes me furious when someone steals one of my designs and claims it for his/her own. You *have* to stick up for your copyrights or else a court will say you are passively agreeing to let your stuff be used.

In addition to my Bella site and Fu T'sang Treasures, I have the About Chemistry site. I haven't found any stolen material from my About site, but many About Guides have had their content taken. About sends a threatening e-mail to copyright infringers and is usually successful at getting content removed, paid for, or some other agreeable solution.

So, what I do when I find theft is send an e-mail to the webmaster of the site involved asking them to please remove the information in question. The e-mail also mentions that if this material is not removed by such-and-such a date that I will report the problem to their ISP and go on from there. I disagree that stealing website content happens infrequently. I think it happens a lot and needs to be dealt with when seen... nicely, politely if possible. If not, well...

Anne
Fashion Jewelry
http://www.bellaonline.com/site/fashionjewelry

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I believe as far as the copyright office goes, that they've ruled recently that if it's on a website, and you have your name on it, that you are stating you own it and someone else can't take it. The fact that there are sites like archive.org out there backing up our entire site every month helps prove that issue. So if someone were to say "Well I wrote it first", we just go to archive.org and say "We had it up in 2002 in April. Your file went up Nov 2002. Sorry." It's usually pretty clear.

Everything on our site is most definitely written and owned by us. It has our names in bold at top, our photos, and an explicit copyright statement at the bottom. So if any content from Bella showed up on any non-host site in the future (i.e. if someone took your work without your permission and you wanted to complain) it would be extremely easy to do so and to prove through database records and log records and archive.org records that your content was on the web first.

What I do every month or so is just search in google for a key phrase or two from various popular articles. If I find myself, that's good. If I don't find myself, it's time to go to DMOZ and make sure the article is in there <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> And if I find someone else, I write them asking them to remove the content and replace it with a link to my site.


P. Pureheart
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Rae, that's a shame that people steal your images. What you can do if you want to have fun with this is put all your images into a single directory structure (you can have subdirectories in it). Every month, just rename that top level directory to something new. Then use BKReplace or any other search-and-replace routine to search and replace out the old directory name for the new one and reload your files. It'd probably take 10 minutes to do everything.

As far as someone swiping the images and putting them on their own site, when you name your images, always start them with a distinct set of 4 letters. So say start them with 4K7Y. Most people don't rename images when they steal them, they just save the file with that name and then load them up. So now just search the web for a few common image names that you know are popular.

I just did it - I went to google.com, clicked on the images tab and searched for

down_9910.jpg

I found my downy woodpecker image from my birding site, but I didn't find anything else. So nobody else took that photo and kept the name at least.

Of course I just searched for "lisa.jpg" and found tons of Lisas, none of them me! That was actually really neat, to see what all the Lisas in the world look like <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />


P. Pureheart
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I have that same problem too. For my web site www.imissthe80s.com people link directly to my images and steal my bandwidth. This has gotten much worse in the last few years thanks to googles image search. Sometimes I will change the name of the image or e-mail the person and ask them to save it to their own hard drive.

In the past I have had people steal my content in it's entirety and put their name on it. I used to keep a whole lot of my educational programs that I created in grad school on-line, until I found out people were basically just cut & pasting the whole thing and calling it there own, sometimes still linking to my images.

I could see if I had submitted it to a lesson sharing site but I hadn't. So I just took all the good stuff down and left a few old ones on geocities.

I don't know what we can do about content thieves. <img src="/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />


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It is pretty easy on a webserver to say in essence that the only person with permission to show an image is that same server. Meaning that nobody else anywhere on the web *can* link to it remotely. Geocities does that for example - if you try to link remotely to an image you get the "Sorry GeoCities doesn't allow that" message. So you might want to do that <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Another option is to watermark all of your images - that is, put your URL at the bottom of it! That way even if someone does use it, they are giving you free publicity <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />


P. Pureheart

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