Scraped! Am I doing this right?
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I made a post on my blog this evening and within an hour got a pingback which made it clear that the entire post had been scraped – impressive, since I used no tags and only the one category, “miscellaneous”….
(I’ve been reading so much about scraping recently that my head spins with all the options and terms used, so bear with me for being a little slow about these things. Even though, with Jonathan’s advice from PlagiarismToday, we’ve just submitted a DMCA notice with respect to a blogspot blog which has been regularly ripping off my wife’s blog, I don’t really understand the system.)
So: I’ve gone to whois.net, inputted the domain name of the scraper (chemicalengineeringconsulting.com), and out pops a list of info: privacyprotect.org seems to be the registrant, and contact@… the domain admin email. Is that who I mail my DMCA notice to? (I have no intention of visiting the site or messing around with informal complaints.) Is it that simple?
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Grrrr….why does the avatar so frequently obscure a question on these forums – can that please be fixed one day? Let’s try repeating that last para:
So: I’ve gone to whois.net, inputted the domain name of the scraper (chemicalengineering consulting.com), and out pops a list of info: privacyprotect.org seems to be the registrant, and contact@… the domain admin email. Is that who I email my DMCA notice to? (I have no intention of visiting the site or messing around with informal complaints.) Is it that simple?
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The person who owns the domain is almost certainly the person who stole your content in the first place. It’s unlikely they’ll comply with your copyright notice – they are spammers who don’t care that what they are doing is illegal.
You need to send your DMCA notice to the hosting company that manages their server – SoftLayer in this case. I believe SoftLayer sets the bar high for removing content so you’ll need to follow their instructions to the letter. You’ll find the details here:
I don’t see anything wrong with your avatar or with the way your forum post is displayed.
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Aha! Thanks for that tellyworth. (It was me wot tipped off stolen.wordpress on this one, only a few hours ago.) That’s stopped me making a mistake & complaining to the wrong people.
For future reference, can you explain how you got the SoftLayer info from the chemicalblah….. URL? I thought whois was the way to go, but clearly not.
BTW – the (expanded) avatar was still covering the lower LH side of my original question when I first looked at this thread – but, after clicking on the stolen.wordpress link, and clicking back, it no longer does so. Bizarre. Avatars obscuring the original post on these forum threads is a common occurrence for me – Oh well. Would be interested to hear if anyone else sees this.
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Probably a browser issue. What are you using? I’ve never seen that, and I’m using Firefox 3.
You can also report the scraper to Google if he’s running Adsense. That tends to be highly effective since without ads, they have no reason to continue to blog and you can often kill many blogs with one DMCA notice. Click on “Ads by Google” at the bottom of the ads and follow the procedure marked “report a violation.”
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domaintools.com has the most useful Whois lookup info:
http://whois.domaintools.com/chemicalengineeringconsulting.com
The ‘Server Data’ block will usually identify the name of the hosting company. It should at least show the IP address of the server. Click the little [W] next to its IP address to find out who owns the server (or the network that the server is connected to).
Sometimes there’s some more ad-hoc digging required to find out the true owner of the server – the IP whois will often show that the network is owned by a huge data center or network, when the server itself is owned by a much smaller company that rents some rack space in their DC (possibly through several layers of resellers). In general a DMCA sent to the data center will eventually make its way to the server owner but it’s much better form to locate the owner of that specific server if possible. I make an effort to do that and find their published DMCA info if I can.
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NB the current score card on http://stolen.wordpress.com/ is 18 sites removed to 4 still active.
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“Probably a browser issue.” I wish I had a pound for every time I’d read that…. ;-)
I’m a luddite who still uses IE6: and, yes, in response to previous “pabi” recommendations, I’ve tried IE7, firefox and others; each of which sadly messes up more things than they fix (for me, anyway.) Most times when I’ve been told “pabi”, it isn’t; but it might be this time….in which case I’ll have to live with it….at least now I know that pressing the back button, then the forward button sorts it….
I’ve tried the Adsense route before, and got nowhere, btw; and that involves visiting the site which, as I’ve mentioned before, can lead to problems. If you’re then wondering how I know without visiting it that the site is a scraper: I googled it, and found that they’d copied a large number of posts from others on topics unrelated to “chemical engineering”….what still puzzles me is how they fastened on to my post so rapidly (within an hour of publishing) since I use neither tags nor feeds….
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