Hi Everyone.
I'm writing this in response to a thread by Slacky which developed into a discussion about copying content from other people's websites. Some thought it was harmless and funny,so I thought I'd share my knowledge on the subject, in the hope it might help some of you.
Loads and loads and loads of people stole my solar panel cleaning pics in the early days. They copy and pasted my website text too. I'd call them, very politely asking them to remove the copyrighted content. Many were genuinely shocked to find their web designer had breached copyright law and the content was removed.
If it wasn't removed within 7 days, I'd email them, reminding them they have breached copyright laws. I would tell them they had a further 7 days to remove the content, otherwise we would issue a DMCA Takedown against them.
Usually, that did the trick. But I did get two whole WEBSITES taken off the internet completely by issuing DMCA Takedowns. The website owners were both furious and called me ranting and raving. I simply pointed them to my email.
BE WARNED: Using other people's content, both pictures and text, can massively damage your own business. Having your whole website blacklisted and removed from the Internet is not good. Imagine the impact that would have. Copy the wrong company's content and they will come for you and quite rightly so.
There are loads of window cleaning websites with solar panel cleaning pages that have copy and pasted our content. They did this to help boost their own Google rank. I used to pursue each one of them and get the content removed. But by the way, Google have changed their algorithm so that if you copy and paste someone else's content, it shows that the original content is valuable. Google strengthen the webpage ranking of the original content and actually downgrade the copied content. This is great for me because my websites are strong anyway and rank well in Google, but get stronger every time someone copies my content and their website slips down the ranking. I no longer pursue people for copying text.
As for pictures, WATERMARK THEM! This will stop people being tempted to copy your pictures. Or if you really want to use the pic, set it up on your website as a hyperlink to the original webpage you got it from. It can be advantageous to do that in certain circumstances. Google will not downgrade your webpage if you do that, but may increase the strength of the webpage by linking to a quality website.
You might think it's clever, quick and easy to copy other people's content, but you're actually shooting yourself in the foot. Your website will rank lower as a result.