I found a web page that contains a couple of lines that were copied from an article I wrote.
It is just a tiny portion of the entire page, but it is obviously copied as they were my exact words.
The entire page consist of portions of text which unrelated to each other, but are related to the title of the page.
For example, if the title of the page were “Cats”, the article would consist of random, unrelated sentences about cats.
It looks like all of the portions of text were just plucked and stolen from my article and from articles that other people have written.
Would it be worth it to do a cease and desist or file a DMCA complaint, considering that the percentage of the text that was copied from my article is so tiny?
Personally, I wouldn’t bother. These low quality auto-generated sites will eventually go away as the search engines continue to develop algorithms that detect and de-index them and services like AdSense find them and ban them, depriving them of any revenue. In the meantime, it is like a game of Whac-A-Mole; if you knock one down, another pops up somewhere else.
yeah I found a site that linked to mine and it seems to have a program that tries to re-word your content so they can host it on theirs.
The program is so bad that effectively the result is gibberish. They probably are making ad money by having THOUSANDS of “articles” on web design published a day.
With any luck it is correct that these fake websites will be detected and slammed. No human being could read them. On the other hand, at least they do give me a link, and it looks like sometimes people click through from it …
You can send a cease and desist (don’t pay a lawyer for it though!). If it’s a company who is responsive at all, they’ll remove it. If that same company is responsive to a C&D though, they’d likely be just as responsive to a less formal “Hey, that’s my article, quit using it or at least credit me”.
I think votrechien1 ( that’s an interesting user name btw…hehe… ) is right. I think they’d be pretty responsive to a casual mail saying,“hey, that’s mine!”. Otherwise, if it doesn’t bother you too much, just let it be.
) is right. I think they’d be pretty responsive to a casual mail saying,“hey, that’s mine!”. Otherwise, if it doesn’t bother you too much, just let it be.