How to protect your content from scrapers - Page 3

Sending a DMCA notice

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. To report a copyright infringement the copyright owner should submit a notification under penalty of perjury, including a list of specified elements, to the service provider or designated agent.

Some companies do provide a template or form. For example, Facebook provides a form. In my case, AdBrite guys asked me the following information:

In order to process a complaint of copyright infringement, we need the copyright owner to provide the information below. If you are the copyright owner please be sure to provide a complete response, including the statements of “good faith belief” and “penalty of perjury” in 5 and 6. You can provide the information in a response to this email.

Required information:

1. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright that has been allegedly infringed;
2. Identification of works or materials being infringed;
3. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing including information regarding the location of the infringing materials that the copyright owner seeks to have removed, with sufficient detail so that AdBrite is capable of finding and verifying its existence;
4. Contact information about the notifier including address, telephone number and, if available, e-mail address. This information will be provided to the publisher upon request to facilitate dispute resolution;
5. statement that the notifier has a good faith belief that the material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement made under penalty of perjury that the information provided is accurate and the notifying party is authorized to make the complaint on behalf of the copyright owner.

It would be better if you contact the company before sending a DMCA notice, that way they may provide a template or form. Otherwise, you can use stock letters provided by Plagiarism Today.

References

• Whois lookup and Domain name search
• Access Control – Apache
• DMCA Stock letters

Further Readings

• Scraper site
• Web scraping
• DMCA – Wikipedia
• Plagiarism Today
• The other side: Anti-DMCA Website