MeXscape

Last Wednesday, my friend and alert blogger Nancy, who writes Countdown to Mexico, sent me an email that she had discovered a site that was using her content without permission. She had been looking at her site stats on Technorati and noticed a link she hadn't seen before. Boy was she surprised when she saw what was going on. She emailed me so I could keep an eye on my stats and see if I was having the same problem. I decided to visit the offending site and was incensed to discover that 25 of my posts had been stolen and posted there.

I think blog posts are a pretty personal thing for most bloggers. We write about our hopes and dreams, things that make us happy, things that make us sad, the world as we see it. Maintaining a blog is not easy. It takes a few hours to turn out a blog post. In the course of writing, we share some intimate things about ourselves, whether we mean to or not. The fact that someone had taken these things – to sell real estate for God's sake – sent me spiraling into new heights of fury.

There was no contact information for the site whatsoever, so Nancy had taken the step of going to the offending site and commenting on all the posts that were hers that the posts were being used without permission. Her posts were immediately removed from the site. I thought of doing the same thing. But as I looked around, I noticed that the site owner had also stolen from Mazatlan Tidbits, Mazatlan Journey, Our Home in Mazatlan, Moving to Mazatlan, Que Pasa?, and others, along with sites like Noroeste, the LA Times, and Solutions Abroad. I knew that something more had to be done.

Chuck's first thought was to send a DMCA takedown notice. I was a little shy about the takedown notice. The DMCA has been used as a very large stick with which to beat unsuspecting website owners. Because the only way for a web host to avoid liability in a copyright case is to take down a site upon receipt of a notice, people have intentionally misused the DMCA to take down competitor's sites at crucial times. (You can find more information at Chilling Effects.) In the end, I decided that this particular situation was exactly what the DMCA was for, and I was completely justified in making use of it.

I wrote a DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement (a copy is included at the end of this post) and sent it to the website's hosting company by email. Within a few hours, I received notification from the host that they had disabled the offending website. I went to check, and sure enough, I got a site disabled message when I visited. I did a little happy dance and had a bunch of grand thoughts about the little guy prevailing and the world working the way it was supposed to. All of which ended abruptly 20 minutes later when the site was back up.

I couldn't believe it. The site was back up, and my content was still there. I only thought I was angry before. This guy had the audacity not only to steal my content, but to thumb his nose at me and put it back up. And I am not talking about my restaurant info or stuff about Mazatlan holidays. He took deeply personal stuff like Happy Birthday Chuck. Now it wasn't an annoyance. It was a crusade.

I emailed the host again to find out why the site was back up with the copyrighted material still in evidence. I did not receive a quick answer, so I moved on to other things. My first thought was to email all of the other bloggers about the situation and send them my takedown notice as an example so they could each send one of their own. I quickly discovered that many bloggers do not have any contact info – no email address, no contact form, nada. So on to the next thing.

I noticed that the site was using Google AdSense. Which pissed me off all over again. They were making money from the stolen content. I emailed Google and let them know that site was engaged in copyright infringement.

The site also had a box to search for flights on Travelocity. I looked at the url from their site to Travelocity's and got their affiliate id number. I then emailed This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and let them know that their affiliate was engaged in copyright infringement and attached a copy of the official DMCA notice. A real person from Travelocity emailed me back in minutes thanking me for bringing the situation to their attenton.

Next, I started emailing all of the condo projects that were advertised on the site, politely letting them know that advertising on a site that was stealing from expat bloggers was damaging their reputation in the expat community. I was starting to smile.

Finally, I got notification from the web host that the site was again disabled and is scheduled for deletion on February 13. I am still periodically checking the site to make sure it stays down. In the meantime, I will keep a closer eye on links and do periodic web searches for my content. There is also a service called Copyscape that will monitor your site and check the internet for copying.

If you find yourself in the same situation, here is my DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement for you to use as a model. Most hosts will accept the notice by email. You usually want to send the notice to their abuse email address.

Subject: DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement

I, Jennifer Swarts, Owner and Author of MeXscape.net, certify under penalty of perjury, that I am an agent authorized to act on behalf of the owner of certain intellectual property rights.

I have a good faith belief that the items or materials listed below are not authorized by law for use by www.mazatlanweblog.com (IP: 66.147.242.97) or their agents and therefore infringes the copyright owner's rights. I hereby demand that you act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material or items claimed to be infringing.

The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/2/
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/3/
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/4/

The URLs where my copyrighted material is located include
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/2/
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/3/
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/4/

Infringing material that I demand be disabled or removed in consideration of the above:
http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/

http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/2/

http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/3/

http://www.mazatlanweblog.com/blog/mazatlansinaloa/mazatlan/page/4/

Location of ORIGINAL WORKS:

You can reach me at jennifer at mexscape.net for further information or clarification. My phone number is +1-xxx-xxx-xxxx and my mailing address is Jennifer Swarts, (removed for my privacy)

There is no contact information on the offending website, and the domain was registered privately, so I cannot provide contact information for the web site owner.

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Jennifer Swarts
January 29, 2009

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Comments (2)

• |Registered |m-d-Y H:i:s NancyD  - Way to go!
  Jennifer, While we had emailed each other a dozen times over a couple days relating to this situation, I had no idea what all was transpiring behind the scenes.
  
  Contacting Travelocity and Google was brilliant. And I'm sure the other realtors in town will keep an eye out in the future now, too.
  
  Thank you so much for all your efforts and also for providing us with the template in case this happens again in the future.
  
  It does kind of make you wonder what his next project will be, doesn't it?
  
  Thanks again, amiga.
  
  Nancy
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• |SAdministrator |m-d-Y H:i:s jennifer  - Way to go!
  Yeah, I tend not to let things go when I get mad. I have had some of his other stuff taken down as well. It was easy, because he is a thief and there was stolen content on other sites too.
  
  He has finally wised up and taken all stolen content off all of his sites that I can track down.
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• |67.171.42.xxx |m-d-Y H:i:s Chris
  Looks like you are part of a trend... This is from the New York Times dated May 12, 2009.
  
  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/technology/internet/12digital.html?_r=1&hpw
  
  Article is titled, "Print books are targets of pirates on the web."
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