It’s really upsetting when I find out someone is stealing my work, and profiting from my hard work I spent hours or even days writing for my blog.
How should I deal with copyright infringement?
The first step is to send an e-mail to the website owner who plagiarize your work.
If they do not respond, use http://www.whois.net/ to find out who the hosting company is by looking in the Domain servers section for the offending domain name name-server. I will e-mail the hosting company technical support department and file a copyright infringement complaint against the website.
If the hosting company is not helpful, I can report the copy infringement to Google AdSense if they have Google AdSense on their website. Then I can write a complaint to AdSense here https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=dmca_complaint .
If they do not have google AdSense then I can write an actual letter or fax not e-mail to the address listed on http://www.google.com/dmca.html which also has great advice for dealing with copyrighted content being stolen from webmasters.
A non-legal reason to stop websites from copying your content is it can damage your SEO and your reputation if the copyrighted material is on a site with a bad reputation. Duplicate content can hurt your search rankings in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. Imagine how unfair it will be if the person who stole your content had a higher search result then you by using your stolen content. Would you want your work to be on an adult entertainment, racist, or site which is incredibly biased? The answer is most likely NO!