Forum Moderators: not2easy
A lot of sites have copied single pages from my site but I ignore it. This process is for when the entire site is copied.
The process I usually take is;
1. Contact their advertisers.
If they have google adsense on their site I send a DMCA to google adsense.
I like to make sure I hit whoever copied the site where it hurts and hopefully stop them dead in their tracks.
Notifying someone else, like the host or a search engine before adsense does their thing can work against you as it will alert the copiers.
2. Get them removed from the search engines.
If they have no adsense ads I notify google search engine and get them removed from the search engine, using google DMCA, yahoo dmca etc.
3. Get their hosting company to drop them.
Once I have managed to do the above and the ads have been removed and/or they are taken from google search engine I then contact the host (by email). Having dealt with many belligerent hosting companies I go for the most upstream host I can find. This requires a little technical expertise, but by going through the WHOIS data and checking the IP address owners etc. I can usually get some sort of action from the hosting company. A lot of the time any site that the copier has is taken down and they lose their host along with any payments they have made.
4. Profit.
I don't really have a step 4 but I am thinking of starting to take legal action and try and get some money from these peoples through the courts.
Once I have an address I can arrange someone to knock on the door and see if the person actually has any money. Taking someone to court who has no money would be a waste of time. Although dealing with the legal system would require feeding a lawyer and in most cases the lawyer would be the winner.
I have found sending cease and desist letters to be good short term fixes. They reappear under a different website name later. I really want to stop these people cold.
Does anyone have any better suggestions on how to deal with site scrapers or has anyone had any success with the legal system?
Final option, send Guido around to reason with him. KF
there is a good php script on this very site which can limit the amount of pages a user can access over a chosen time period. (you can limit them to a maximum of 100 pages every 24 hours, for example.) it can also limit the speed that pages on your site are spidered. if a user exceeds either rule then you can automatically block their IP.
it lets you whitelist all the search engines as well, so you don't have to worry about blocking googlebot.
the script is in the php forum's library.
I think I will have to install a script which locks people out after a number of articles.
Today I checked and found two more copies. one of which appears to have even left in links back to my own site.
It really does take too much time sending faxes and fielding queries from lawyers. And then following it up when it is only half fixed.
