What To Do If You Have Web Content Stolen Part 1
By Matt GarrettOK, so you've found some of your prized web content being displayed as home-grown in another web content field, and you want to uproot it and bring it back home. The difficulty lies in the fact that you have no way to get into the site to which it has been transplanted.
So your only alternative is to tell the site's owner, provided you can find out who that actually is, that you know they are harboring stolen property (yours, intellectual) and you want him or her to stop harboring it.
What would happen in an ideal world would be that the site's owner would suffer embarrassment and a guilty conscience, and would immediately remove your content from the site, offer to compensate you in some way if you allow it to remain there (with your byline), or both remove it and offer to compensate you. (What have I been smoking?)
But there are some ways of asking which have proved more persuasive than others, and if you learn what they are, you might be able to keep the law out of your business.
1. You should go against the prevailing winds when it comes to matters of copyright theft, because those prevailing winds would steer you away from directly confronting your plagiarist.
Many web site content providers feel that negotiating with content thieves is akin to negotiating with terrorists, and that doing so will only encourage them to come back for seconds. But there is always a possibility that the party which is using your content without permission is doing so without realizing they are not playing fair.
2. Not everyone who posts website content is conversant in copyright law, and even some of the ones who are might be gullible enough to accept at face value the content which they receive from someone else.
You may have found your content on a site of someone who actually paid for it, but paid the original thief, and was an unwitting fence to your illegally pawned material. A third scenario is that your content has been spread around the web so freely that it is now considered public domain material.
3. So yes, there is always a chance that an honest mistake accounts for your web content ending up wherever you found it. And in that case, the only way you'll be able to find the real thief is to trace the path your work traveled, by communicating the website owner.
You can be as plain spoken as you like in your request to the site owner that your content be removed from his or her site, and model that request after the cease and desist letters so beloved of attorneys.
4. By spelling out the specific deadline for removing your copy, as well as the consequences which will follow if the copy is not removed, you may be able to light a fire under the website owner, or at least generate a response explaining how you content came to be on their site.
In the next installment, we'll look at what sort of language to include in your letter to the apparently guilty party, and what you will have to think about doing if he or she is not persuaded.
Author: Matt Garrett © 2007 CopyDefender.com | Protect Your Web Content
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