Ask HN: Is this a DMCA takedown?

by jreposa on 1/8/2009, 11:40 PM with 7 comments

IANAL, but I just found a site that has identical content as a recent blog post of mine.

Exhibit A: (the thief) http://www.vevz.com/the-year-that-was-2008-a-rundown-of-the-major-financial-events-that-rocked-the-nation

Exhibit B: (my site) http://www.mybanktracker.com/articles/2009/01/08/the-year-that-was-2008-a-rundown-of-the-major-financial-events-that-rocked-the-nation/

He even forgot to remove my links at the bottom of his page.

I already sent an email to abuse@bluehost.com (his DNS points there), but should I be throwing around the DMCA word yet? How do you file a DMCA complaint?

Completely new territory for me...

  • by answerly on 1/8/2009, 11:54 PM

    I have dealt with these type of folks before and DMCA threats mean very little to them. What hurts them is getting de-listed/penalized in search engines, particularly Google. I would suggest reporting to Google's web spam team. You can access the Google web spam form through Google webmaster tools.

  • by jreposa on 1/9/2009, 2:26 AM

    It seems that it's a scraper site with all content stolen from around the web. If you go to the vevz site, there are a ton of blog posts copied verbatim (links intact on most of them).

    Also, I just realized... Who uses a four letter domain name for this type of stuff?

  • by wmf on 1/9/2009, 1:44 AM

    http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/05/15/takedown-faq/

    I've seen a DMCA takedown template somewhere, but I can't find it right now.

  • by calbers on 1/8/2009, 11:59 PM

    IANAL, this is simply a case of copy write infringement, not a violation of the DMCA - which prevents the dissemination of information with circumvents an owner's copyright. They stole your content, plain and simple.