Stop, Thief! We Can Do Business

January 31st, 2008 | by Scott

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Content theft happens a lot online. Often it happens without the thieves even realizing that they’re doing anything wrong. There’s a lot of debates over why this is so, with ideas from poor schooling to poor parenting and something labeled “digital disrespect” being tossed around.

Whatever the root cause (or causes) are, the bottom line is that more and more people seem to either feel it’s okay to violate copyrights, or just don’t understand that they are violating copyrights with using and sharing other’s property online.

Now, I’m not going to get into the full debate here, but I did want to comment on the portion of it that affects site or online business owners who suddenly find their content or materials being used somewhere else.

When this happens, and depending on just what content is being used there are basically two ways to approach it.

NOTE: I’m referring to text and graphic content here, not software or other advanced mediums

First, you can contact the thief with a Cease and Desist letter and hope they comply. And if they don’t you can then contact their web host provider and so on up the chain in the hopes that someone along the way will eventually pull down the stolen content.

This is the most obvious and used option available, and most of the time it will be effective for you in terms of getting your content off the offending site(s). However, you’re not going to see any compensation beyond that by doing this unless you go the full length of taking the thief to court… and of course you win the case.

And even then unlike on TV Court shows, just winning a judgment doesn’t mean you’ll ever actually see any money from the thief because financial judgments are often impossible to collect on for the average person.

The second option will require some more thought, but it may just prove more lucrative for you in the long run than having your content pulled down would be.

Recently I heard of a graphic artist who discovered a major clothing company was using one of his designs, but they hadn’t commissioned the use through him.

So he sent them a non-threatening letter basically saying “hey, it’s pretty cool to see my design on your stuff but shouldn’t I have been asked first?”

It turned out the company had purchased the design from another artist, but they conceded without question that artist must have ripped-off of his original design.

The company quickly offered to stop using the design, or if he preferred they’d continue using it and pay him a percentage off of all sales.

He agreed to the continued use and then a really unexpected thing happened. Obviously the company was impressed with his artistic talents since they were already using his design, so after finding him to be “easy to work with” since he hadn’t approached them in anger or with threats of legal actions, the company offered to commission more designs from him.

That story got me to thinking, if someone steals your site content it may be worth looking at how they’re using it, how popular their use of it is, and determine if there isn’t some way you might leverage their theft for your own benefit that would be better than just having them pull it down.

If you can come up with a plan to get valuable backlinks, free publicity or in some way carve off some of the traffic or revenue they’ve generated with your content then it might be in your best interest to approach them in a non-threatening manner and suggest your plan as an alternative to requesting they take down the content.

Again, every situation is going to be unique and depend on a lot of things, but it’s certainly worth considering at least if someone steals your content and then has something (links, traffic or revenue) to offer from it rather than just demanding they remove it from their site(s).

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