No, they won't take a phone call unless you have an adsense rep who makes it available to you. File a DMCA if you're located in the states.

A DMCA can remove the content, if you and the scraper's domain hosting are in the USA. That requires you to determine the host and its location which you can do via a whois search.

AdSense is not as likely to get involved (regardless of the number of violations) by using a file you submit as they would by simply submitting a report. A little online sleuthing can save you (and Google) some work. If you have a file that lists the domains involved, you can use whois searches to see if more than one of the domains are owned by the same person (and AdSense acct) and not need to report each domain separately.

If the violations are as widespread and obvious as your question suggests, try submitting a report for separately owned domains. Google offers a form [support.google.com] to do that and one of the options is to report AdSense violation regarding the content of a site. They investigate and it lends credence and support to your claims if you have filed a DMCA complaint - regardless of its success or delays.

I do not think you need to be in the US to file a DMCA, but the person you are sending the DMCA notice to does need to be in the US. If they are not in the US, find out what you should do by their local laws.

However, that only deals with your content - you have no standing with regard to breaches of other people's copyrights. However, you could alert other copyright holders.

If the scraped content appears in Google or Bing search results then you can send DMCA notices to them regarding that - if you and a lot of other copyright holders complain they may just remove the whole site.

In my experience Google does act promptly on DMCA notices. However those instances were over a decade ago.

Nowadays, Google even questions your identity when you submit a DMCA.

I notice they don't even penalize the offending site even when it is utter crap.

Nowadays this stealing of content is at pandemic levels. On YouTube, people are downloading videos and reuploading them as their own. So long as they get away with it...

Google doesn't care. Like I said, they don't even ban these people in Adsense or de-index them.

Google IS part of the problem. Everything in this world is going down in real time and you are seeing it with your own eyes...

My content has been stolen by hundreds of .club .info .#*$! international garbage scraping websites. I have filed DMCA notices and contacted Google and nothing has ever happened to the sites. All these sites are protected by proxy and attempting to contact these MFers is nearly impossible.

You also have to remember Google is a publicly traded company. The more ads being displayed the more $$$ they are going to be making. Google will continue to break profit records. The wild west of copyright infringement is alive and well. Attempting to shutdown sites or even proving who is the original creator of the content is impossible.

It almost makes me want to join the scraping party!

@itek

Google is a publicly traded company

What is the relevance of a company being publicly traded? Are you suggesting that private companies are less eager to earn profits than those that have their shares listed on exchanges? Wouldn't it be easier for a private company to cheat its customers and investors? Public companies have stringent regulations regarding financial reporting, private companies do not.

The more ads being displayed the more $$$ they are going to be making.

That is not necessarily true, Adsense/Adwords are brands. Advertisers want to get the highest ROI possible, having your ads shown on spammy websites is not good for advertisers. If Google, takes quantity of quality strategy, there is good chance that the biggest advertisers would seek alternative networks to display their ads. Displaying your ads on spammy website is not good for your brand. The proof is that last January Adsense rolled out the Ad-balance feature that allows you to limit the number of ads displayed on your site based on revenue potential revenue. You can essential block all ads that have a low likelihood generating revenue. This clearly shows that Adsense is not using, what you claim, the more ads more $$$ strategy.

I don't doubt that scapers have stolen content from you. Luckily for me it has been limited. I fully understand the frustration of not being able to fight this. But the fact that someone has stolen your content does not guarantee that they are able to monetize it in any substantial fashion. The chances are that the only real human that has ever seen your scraped content is you, since you went looking for it explicitly. My guess is that these scrapers must be doing this on such a large scale so that the fractions of pennies earned on any scraped pages can add up to few dollars. This can easily be tested. Copy your site, run some ads on the copied site and see what the impact is. Join the party! Then report back, My guess is that you will have wasted a lot of time, effort and cash for nothing.

Remember when you create content you want it to rank at the top, you want people to come engage and hopefully spend some money. The scrapers don't care about any of this, they simply scrape as much content as robotically possible and hope that humans accidentally land on it and click on an ad.

I have filed DMCA notices and contacted Google and nothing has ever happened to the sites.

In the USA there is something called, Fair Use [copyright.gov]. That means there are certain circumstances that allow the use of content. Familiarize yourself with Fair Use BEFORE filing a DMCA and also before recommending anyone file a DMCA. Failure to understand Fair Use and failure to understand the DMCA legal process could cost you thousands of dollars in legal fees.

If you file a DMCA, the person you are filing against can contest the claim. YOU are now responsible for legal costs for arguing this in court. If you failed to take into account fair use you may end up owing thousands of dollars in legal fees.

DMCAs are a serious legal action. You should consider talking to a lawyer first in order to understand what is involved.

I wouldn't call scraping an entire website word for word image for image FAIR USE. I'm familiar with fair use & DMCA legal processes. I run numerous sites that produce millions in page views daily and not afraid of some legal fees to get the point across. The problem arises with all these .club .info .garbage sites hiding behind proxies and international servers. I have sent hundreds of DMCA and cease and desist notices & have not gotten 1 single response back.

The last batch of DMCAs I filed with google (over blogger sites), they actually emailed me back and said, paraphrasing "thanks for the DMCA notices, at the moment, we're not going to do anything as we don't think you realise what a DMCA notice really is and how serious it is."

I had to email them back and say I'd been submitting such notices for 10+ years and only then did they get off their a$$ and do something.

Google is very much part of the problem when it comes to copyright infringement.

I was doing DMCAs early on in this business - and got responses and results. However, the content-stealing turned into a whack-a-mole game and it just didn't become a good use of my time - each filing easily took an hour or more to word "just right". The Apple App Store was/is one of the biggest culprits beyond Google - they do nothing to protect copyrights / trademarks of others and are ready to help any yahoo put their crap-app online and make a profit. It's all on you.

So I stopped checking the store as it infuriated me to see my content being put into apps attempting to profit. Same for websites stealing my content - I just stopped looking and saved myself the stomach ulcer : /

You'd need hired help, a legal team or a lawyer-on-retainer to curtail the amount of content theft on the internet unfortunately. Google should have a type of "content registration" system / database so owners can validate they are, indeed, the true owners of any content as soon as it goes live online.

@Chanandler I agree.

@Nickmns I'm not saying Google is out to cheat anybody, I'm saying the company is publicly traded they need to meet or exceed earning forecasts to make those stockholders happy. Over the past 5 years they obviously have become more lacked on their publisher policies. More income is being made by not banning publishers but sending a violation notice that says hey fix this or else. Why completely ban a middle volume publisher that is creating 20k-30k a month in income for the company over copyright infringement or ad placement. (Out right click fraud I'm assuming is automatic ban still, which it should be)

For the more ads more $$$ I think we are on different pages here. I am referring to the more publishers google has the more potential $$$ they can make (more ads out there)

As for the severity of scrapping I also don't think we're on the same page. I run content niche sites I am not selling a product but rather producing genuine real content in hopes that the user shares the articles with friends and family on Facebook. For instance I had 1 article hit 150k shares last year and produced over 25 million page views. I began noticing copycats. I counted 14 sites with the EXACT same content and images. 1 scraper site was able to produced over 25k shares and probably netted around 15k-20k. I sent a DMCA notice and contacted google about the copyright infringement. That was 6 months ago, today the site is still alive and well with ads.

itek, maybe you've already tried this, but in the last year, I've gone after the hosts much more and leave G to take out of the SERPS only the tough nuts to crack, the ones hosted in Turkey/Russia, etc.

Google Adsense doesn't care, Google Search doesn't care. Actually Google's arrogance is slowly destroying the web.

You can make a lot of money these days by scraping content and monetizing it with Adsense. Google is doing nothing when you report those sites. Why would they? They are one of the world's biggest copyright violators and bandwidth thiefs themselves. Just look at the direct answers in Google Search displaying our texts, or our photos being displayed full size in Google Image Search, hotlinked and using our servers's bandwidth.

I know of one website in my niche with thousands of pages. Almost the entire website consists of crap text, illustrated with thousands of photos stolen from Instagram. They rank number one on Google for many search terms, I guess by buying links or other black hat techniques. They make money with Adsense ads.

I reported this website several times already to Google Search and Google Adsense. Nothing happens. They keep making (lots of) money with crap texts and stolen Instagram photos. In fact, indirectly, Google is making money from ... content stolen from Instagram.

In the mean time small and hard working publishers who create websites with original content are being penalized big time by things like Panda, Penguin and other "quality" signals.

our photos being displayed full size in Google Image Search

Google is using your tacit agreement to show your photos in image search. If you don't want them to show up just block Google-bot from going to the photos, or no-index the pages. This will send the explicit message to Google saying do not display my images.

Google is using your tacit agreement to show your photos in image search. If you don't want them to show up just block Google-bot from going to the photos, or no-index the pages. This will send the explicit message to Google saying do not display my images.

I don't agree. Nobody, not even Google, is allowed to use my server's bandwidth. Hotlinking is bandwidth theft and theft is illegal ... always.

Simply block Google in your robots.txt and then that is it, done. Contrary to most spam bots Google will respect your wish no longer crawl those pages. Just be sure that if you no index any pages, that you ensure that they have been crawled before you block Googlebot otherwise Google will never see the no-index.

I find DMCAs a little hit and miss these days. It seemed a while back Google were fairly unquestioning. Now I have to go back and forth with them to get anywhere.

I find it a little hard to understand how this works when you have a 15 year relationship with Adsense and they appear to be defending spammy scraper sites. I've had them suggest I sort it out with the site owner a few times...

I have on occasion reminded them that, when the content is hosted on Blogger or one of their platforms that they are failing their "Safe Harbor" obligations by not cooperating. This usually gets something done...