As I was poking around a forum today, I noticed that one of the posters mentioned that she had effectively dealt with content theft by utilizing the services of Consumer Help Web.
Now, Consumer Help Web seems to be mostly geared towards helping people resolve problems related to buying products over the web. They try to resolve the problem, and they also post your complaint on the web. This is "public web shaming" at its finest.
Although they don't mention content theft specifically on their site, the forum poster claims that they successfully got the offender to remove the stolen content, even after the poster had gotten nowhere with the offender. So perhaps, the public shaming aspect of it worked.
In any case, the service is cheap (a one-time fee of $14.99), and if it is not successful, CHW will provide you with written documentation that you can present to a consumer attorney or local consumer affairs regulatory agency. In addition, if you aren't satisfied, you can get your money back.
Seems like a good tool to have on hand if you are fighting some scumbag who has stolen your content. Obviously, there are other ways of dealing with the issue, such as contacting the site owner, contacting the site's hosting company, and ISP, and filing a DMCA complaint with the search engines. But this is just one more tool to have in your arsenal as you fight the good fight.
I agree that content stealing is an issue. It’s more annoying when you are writing unique and fun content on a site like http://scruffynews.com every day. It takes time to keep a site like that running and interesting to read.
Thanks for the post as usual Donna! 😉
Dave – blog.brightonvibes.com