ProBlogger has a new guest post up, by Gary from DevOracles.com, on how to stop scrapers from profiting from your work. The article explains how to write Cease and Decist letters and DMCA takedown notices, and who to send them to.
The post recommends starting with the copyright infringer, and if they don’t respond to the C&D in a week or so, or refuse to comply, sending a DMCA takedown to their host. It also suggests letting Google know of the infringement so they could penalize the site in their results, as well as sending a message to Google’s AdSense branch if the scraper is running their ads.
I have found these methods to work in the past, though mainly I haven’t had many problems with scrapers lately. In the past I have had to take action against them, such as the one that had been hanging out at webmaster-source.blogspot.com.
Keep in mind that it’s against the AdSense Terms of Service to place ads on plagiarized work. So if you let Google know of the infringement, they will likely take the ads down, removing the incentive for the scraper to continue making things hard for you.
