| Protecting the content of your web site
How to identify abuse of your content
Using Opentracker.net software analyzing proper and improper user
behavior is simple and visible. We find our web pages on machines
of the Software Technology Parks Of India, in Bombay or Bangalore
like
- file://localhost/F:/Capstone Project/Proposal/Corporate Branding
Services.htm
- file://localhost/F:/Capstone
Project/Proposal/IMPORTANT/Branding.htm.
- file://localhost/C:/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Desktop/31
Jan/Brand Management online.mht
- file://localhost/C:/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Desktop/31 Jan/Multinationals online brands.mht
Question is what is this company doing with pages of Visual Orange
on their machines? We assume they are preparing an offer to the
client
Capstone and to convince this potential client of their expertise the
content of Visual Orange comes handy, as it saves time and the
sales pitch will be supported by a solid phrasing of why we have to
follow up certain guidelines when going online but there could be
many other reasons..
Unusual behavior identification
Another unusual user behavior is when the same user visits all of
the pages of your web site down to password reset page and accesses
the pages of the web sites straight from his machine. For example a
user from The Limelight Networks Llc.; in Tempe Arizona with
changing IP's within the range of this network, but always with
1300x1300 screen resolution, on a Unix system and using Mozilla
(Gecko) 5.0 paid 70 visits with an average page view of 6 pages per
visit, within 10 work days. Pages were not revisited and pop ups
were not accessed via the link on the page self but by accessing
the url directly. This is generally speaking a clear sign of
harvesting content. But here comes the surprise, further
investigation into this matter revealed that Charlotte a Spider of
Searchme, Inc. in Mountain View, CA (search engine start up) was
indexing the pages. Normally spiders are not shown in the stats of
the user tracking software. This spider however shows up as a user
and it seems to mimic user behavior with one difference it accesses
the pages directly. So let's hope searching the internet will
improve.
How to handle copyright issues
What we do:
The first user is blocked from the web site by IP blocking. We
appreciate to serve as a source of inspiration but finding complete
web pages of our company on some remote machine of the competition
is not desired.
Charlotte the spider is welcome and we have to block the IP in
Opentracker self, otherwise we would loose control of the bounce
and click through rate, caused by this new search engine. All the
visits of Charlotte are counted as single events. This means a user
comes and leaves again without clicking through and this is
influencing our user statistics in a negative sense.
Checking your content on www.copyscape.com
If your content is unique and is a mirror of your expertise you
should make a search on copyscape once a month to trace pages that
have your content copied and displayed. When Visual Orange finds
pages with content that are part of our web sites, we do the
following:
- We inform the owner of the fact that he/she published our content
without written consent and that our copyright and our intellectual
property right are violated.
- We grant them 3 work days to remove the content
- Most web site owners are cooperative because it is illegal and a
felony to copy content and this will be prosecuted by court as such
and an additional fine will be requested to compensate the damage.
- Get used to the answer that this content was delivered to them by
some copywriter and they did not know that he/she copied it. If we
would take each case to court, we would be forced to do nothing
else than be in meetings with our attorneys.
What to do when you receive no response
Skip the first steps if you are reluctant to warn the owner of the
web site first and
- file a complaint at Google. Google will ban the web site from its
index when you have proven to be the rightful owner of the content.
Anyway as it is duplicate content, Google will return the content,
displayed in search results, of the page which is first scrolled by
the bot and this is in most cases the rightful owner.
- Contact the hosting company directly. In 95% of all cases the web
sites were taken off the air from the hosting provider if the owner
did not react to our e-mail.
- Get a good lawyer and take the responsible person to court. Almost
all countries follow the Berne copyright convention, this an
established fact and also if a server is located in Panama or even
Thailand damage compensation can reach quickly $150,000 or more,
plus lawyer fees on top of this amount, for willful infringement.
