What’s wrong with content theft?

It hurts the creators of the Web. It targets the most vulnerable.

It takes away from artists, designers, photographers, writers!

I’m not even talking about AI yet!

Content thieves “make money online” off your content.

The expensive sports car they drive could be yours instead.

You can use search by image on Google to find who uses your photos and Copyscape for your written content.

What else can you do to fight back content thieves?

Here are some ideas and actual steps.

 

When content thieves strike

One day two of my blogging friends were struck by bold content thieves.

I do not speak of automatic content scrapers who also are a pain in the back.

I’m dealing here with lowly and greedy copy cats!

This is a post about those who find out which content is very popular on social media just to copy it.

Then they paste it in their entirety to their blogs or social media accounts.

Fight content thieves at least to prevent Google to drop you assuming that you are the duplicate content.

Maybe some automation is used in these cases too.

Yet I’m sure there is some human behind it who will notice when you defend yourself.

Of course getting angry is not enough, you got to strike back to make them feel the pain they inflicted on you.

Lawyers and police do not help much on the Internet.

The Web on the other hand, especially of the social media kind has plenty of self-healing aspects.

These mechanisms are very supportive in obvious content theft cases.

So what can you do exactly to stop content theft?

How can you fight back?

Here are some proven techniques. See below!

How to deal with content theft

Here I present to you ways to fight back content thieves.

Yes, it’s not only about noticing somebody uses your text or images.

1. Hide, block and report content that has been stolen. Mute content theft accounts.
2. File a DCMA Notice when you are the copyright holder. And let Google remove it from search.
3. Tell everybody and expose the content thieves publicly by just writing “The x [blog/account] is a content thief”.
4. Contact their blog hosting service: WordPress.com e.g. is very quick and supportive I was told.
5. Contact their ISP. Run a who is search and report the content thief to the ISP they use. Unless they have a server in the basement, it breaks the TOS.
6. Contact their advertisers. Content thieves want to “make money online” by cheating so fight them where it hurts most. Again, most advertisers do not allow content theft.
7. Use reviews on Google and sites like Trustpilot to give them a bad review.
8. Add the original source where-ever they have been submitted instead of you. Also contact the social site admins to remove the copy and take the original URL of yours.
9. File a Google spam report if the site uses your content in a deceptive way.
10. Find other bloggers whose content has been stolen and act together.
11. Use only freely available content that is free to use altogether as the images on Unsplash are.
12. Write a post making others aware of the ways to fight back content theft.
13. Watermark your images. There are even WordPress plugins that automate it!
14. Add your name and link back to yourself when writing content! My name is Tad!

Any more ideas of how to defend yourself against content theft? Tell me on social media or by mail!

I’m @onreact everywhere. LinkedIn is best to contact me though.

Do not make it worse and prepare upfront

Do not provide additional publicity for the thieves! Why?

They love any kind of engagement!

They do not care how they get views, traffic or links! They only care that they do.

Do not link them – not even using nofollow – as people will still click the links.

Taking precautions is the best way to deal with content theft!

There are few easy measures that will at least make the content theft a two edged sword:

I mentioned some of them already above. Here is how it works specifically.

• Add internal links to existing articles to your list posts.
  
  Thieves are lazy and will not in most cases edit #21, #37 and #54 of your list.
  
  
• Write from a personal point of view!
  
  Say “my friends a, b, c think” and link your blogging peers.
  
  These friends will also notice that they just got befriended by a content thief and at least alert you.
  
  
• Mention your name or your blog in the post.
  
  Yes, I’m Tad and I write this post.
  
  My full name is Tadeusz Szewczyk. Nobody can spell or memorize that though.
  
  Just call me Tad Chef for the sake of simplicity then!

These techniques do not make the content theft go away.

Yet you aren’t and you do not feel powerless in such cases.

Are you also affected? How do you deal with content theft?

As noted above you can share your experiences with me on social media or by mail.

I may even add your insights to the original post here!

Fight back or give it all away?

The best way to fight content theft may also be to give away your content for free.

Why? What is free already can’t get stolen!

I did for many years by offering it under a Creative Commons license.

It has some pros and cons so I do not promote it as much as I did in the past anymore.

Yet for some years it helped my to get additional traction on social media and in search.

Likewise photographers can benefit from giving away their work on sites like the above mentioned Unsplash.