Google News, Inside.

Google AdSense and the DMCA

Posted at 7:16pm EST on 02/23/2009

This has been a long-standing issue for quite some time now. People copying other people without attribution or care of the original work. This happens frequently to a number of blogs, including this one, Ginside.com.

Inside AdSense has written a great article about how to take action and deal with these copyright violators.

Here’s a short blip of content from the article,

The notice should be sent directly from the owner of the copyrighted materials allegedly being infringed (in the example above, that’s you), as we are unable to accept third-party copyright complaints. Also keep in mind that we are unable to process copyright complaints received through the AdSense policy violation report form. Once we’ve received a notice of infringement, we will take appropriate action. If you’d like more information about our DMCA process, please visit http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html.

The directions above are great if you want to get them kicked out of the AdSense program. But what if you want them kicked out of the Google index? Use this instead.

Additionally, if you find a site that is scraping (misappropriating and republishing) your content, you can report it for a potential violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. To do this, fill out the form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport (you must be logged into your Google Account to access this form).

Each method is a great way to help protect your content.

And as a last resolve, you could either stop offering full feeds and only offer partial feeds, or even go to the extreme of not offering RSS at all. This would help minimize the amount of copyright violations, but still wouldn’t guarantee you full complicity.