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There had been plenty of cases of content being stolen by blogs but most of them gave a link back to the source. In this particular case, somebody was stealing my content from article sites onto his blog the very day they got published on the article sites. The worse part was, his pages were getting indexed with the content on search engines (must be pinging the search engines after posting the blog). But on looking deeper I found that the person had copied not only mine but several other author’s articles as well without any credit. I had a strong case.

(Source)

The blog had no way to contact the author (on purpose I guess) but I left a comment on the copied article and using whois information [What is whois] about the domain, sent an email to the domain contact email as well.

Wait for 2-3 days did not result in any mail from the owner. That really pissed me off. This guy dared to copy and then ignored my emails asking him to rectify it. I guess most of the people are not aware of steps so they never follow up after initial warning and that is why people like these keep copying, without any fear. I was able to get it rectified though.

Here are the steps in exact sequence which resulted in me successfully getting my copyright restored:

1. I prepared a list of my articles as well as others which this site had copied.
2. Sent a mail to the website owner (email address found using whois lookup using his domain name on http://www.whois.net/) and left a comment on the problem article on his blog asking him to fix it and give proper credits.
3. I never got any response from him for 2-3 days.
4. I read that there is Digital Millennium Copyright Act [read about it here] which can help me.
5. At first I did not realize that the blog was a wordpress blog so I sent a DMCA notice to Google using their online form (applicable for blogger blogs only).
6. I got a reply from them that it is a not a blogger blog so they cannot do anything.
7. From the whois (http://www.whois.net/) information I found that the site was hosted with Godaddy
8. I went to Godaddy.com and tried to find a way to contact them.
9. I sent a mail to Godaddy Spam and Abuse Department (abuse@godaddy.com) explaining them the situation and asking for their help in taking action against the site.
10. Godaddy folks were prompt in sending me a mail stating that I had to send a claim to CopyrightClaims@GoDaddy.com in accordance with the Copyright and Trademark Policy located at http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/legal_agreements/show_doc.asp?se=%2B&pageid=TRADMARK%5FCOPY
11. I did exactly that. It seems every ISP has a what they call AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) and this comes under that.
12. Godaddy was prompt to bring down the culprit site and informed me about it.
13. It was then that I received a mail from the site owner stating that he had fixed issues on his site.
14. I checked to see that he had proper credits in place.
15. Godaddy lifted the ban

Hope this will help people out who are having similar problems. All hosting companies will have AUP so they should be able to help you out.

Please share your experience here on how you protected your copyright.

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