For those of you that subscribe to my RSS feed, you may have noticed the annoying Copyright blurb at the bottom of each post. It’s there for a reason. A little while back I had all of my posts mirrored at a splog, which had the intent of driving search engine hits to their website in order to pimp their spammy services.

Several months down the line and I found another splog doing exactly the same thing. This time round I took a more forceful approach as they were mirroring the recent video I uploaded in the post entitled Time Lapse. I spent a lot of time making that video and there’s no way I was going to have it being used to garner extra credit in Google without my permission.

The process
I first made contact to the domains owner by hunting down their registration details via the Domaintools Whois interface (good service by the way). I had reservations about whether they’d actually email me back as the listed address was a Hotmail one, which isn’t a good sign for those people who are serious about operating a website.

I didn’t hear anything back from the domain owner so I looked into my next options. There wasn’t really much choice apart from contacting the main host of the website, which I did. Unfortunately they hold the role of a host and not a content sensor, which I can fully understand.

We are not in the position to determine or validate who owns the
intellectual property rights related to the content in question.

As a web host myself I’ve kept a close eye on the legalities and regulations which have slowly been creeping into play since 2000. The legal framework that’s the most important in this case is called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA for short.
In short, the DMCA is a US law that criminalises copyright infringement and other such wonders such as dissemination of technology and ways to circumvent technology.

I did some research and came up with some excellent articles on the DMCA as well as some great examples of cease and desist letters and what most people call a DMCA take down notice.

I’m no legal expert, but I know my rights and thought I’d give a DMCA take down notice a try. I used the following letter as a template and butchered it extensively for my purposes.
Most decent US based hosts will be registered with the US governments copyright office as required under the DMCA and the contact details for each one can be found at the US Copyright Office - Service Provider Agents page.

So after about twenty minutes of tinkering with a new Pages template, a PDF was sent to the host. About half an hour later and the website was taken offline awaiting contact from the domain owner.

I’m quite pleased. I managed to get a dodgy website offline for illegally using my website content. I’d encourage anyone else who has their content stolen to pursue exactly the same route. I’m more than willing to share the template I made up and there’s plenty of articles online to assist in the process.