What To Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Content
An estimated 31 million people throughout the United States today consider themselves to be bloggers. For the bloggers who use their online site as a source of serious income, protecting their intellectual property rights can be essential to the success of their blog.
If you discover that someone has stolen one of your blog posts, here are three things that you can do to take action.
1. Contact the owner of the site where your stolen content has been published.
If you find your photographs or text from your blog posts being published on another blog, contact the site's owner and let them know. Making the owner aware of the fact that you recognize your intellectual property has been compromised can often be enough to get them to take down the content in question.
Provide a time frame in which you would like the offending information removed, and suggest that you are willing to take legal action to protect your intellectual property from improper use.
2. Report the user to social media network administrators.
When your intellectual property is being used on a social media network, you should take the time to report this use to the network administrators. If a user is willing to overlook your intellectual property rights, they may have posted content that wasn't their own in the past.
Social media networks do not tolerate stolen content, and they may ban the user from interacting with others on their network in the future.
3. File a DMCA takedown notice.
Lawmakers recognize the importance of helping bloggers protect their intellectual property rights, and have instituted a regulation known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to provide protection against stolen content. One of the provisions of the DMCA is that blog hosting platforms could be considered as a contributing party if they allow stolen content to remain on any of the blogs that they are hosting.
By filing a DMCA takedown notice, you notify the hosting company that your content is being used without authorization. The hosting company will then demand that your intellectual property be removed from the offending site, and can even shut down the offending site for failure to comply.
Protecting your intellectual property rights from infringement is essential when it comes to keeping your blog unique and profitable, so if you are concerned about your legal rights when your intellectual property is being used without your permission, contact Joseph E Mueth Law Office or a similar firm.
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