Thursday, December 29, 2005

Webmasters Protect Your Own Damn Content!

What the hell is wrong with all these cry baby writers and webmasters crying foul that Google should protect their content?

  • Google didn't write your content, nor did MSN or Yahoo
  • Google didn't steal your content, nor did MSN or Yahoo
  • Google isn't a law enforcement agency, nor is MSN or Yahoo
  • Protect your own shit and grow the fuck up!
Putting the blame on Blogger and AdSense is just pandering to the masses when all sorts of blogs not on Blogger steal content as well and use all sorts of ways to monetize their sites other than AdSense but of course if you aren't Google bashing then nobody gives a shit and won't read your flea bitten bullshit blogs.

Hell, many scrapers aren't even using blogs, they just scrape crap into some automatically generated pages on some free web server hosted in BFE (Bum Fuck Egypt) where your complaints to abuse@bfe.com will be ignored because your email isn't written in Swahili.

So what's a webmaster to do?
  • File a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint to the ISP hosting the site and Google, Yahoo and MSN. Since the search engines are all in the US they have to comply with US law.
  • Install some robot blocker/scraper stopper scripts (see link at page bottom)
  • Fix your damn blog software to make scraping harder instead of putting a months worth of shit on one page which is imperceptible for scraper stopper scripts to catch someone downloading a page every now and then vs. many pages.
How do you file a DMCA complaint?

You should read the DMCA law first (pay special attention to the safe harbor provision) as it will help you get it right the first time as there are some specific things you must do, such as provide exact samples or the infringement, URLs, etc. and swear on a stack of religious reading material that you're the original author.
Typically 1-2 days and POOF! they are gone.

They will now be offline, or at a minimum locked out of the 3 search engines which is what they use to drive traffic in the first place. If they are using AdWords (or something similar) for PPC traffic, you may have to take that up with Google's AdWords dept. or whoever they use.

Now, to make sure you are fully legal, take your lazy ass to the US Copyright website and spend about $30 getting a legal copyright so you can drag US-based thieving assholes into court and take advantage of what's called "statutory damages" which can hit 6 figures.

TIP: What I do on my primary web site is set a "usage" fee on the policies page, just like photographers do for images, and set the page content licensing fee at $2,000 per page. Whether this holds up in court is another matter but it sure works for photographers with stolen copyrighted images so I'm willing to give it a whirl when someone steals my shit.

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