If someone takes content from your site without asking, does the law protect you? Learn the surprising answer and how to shield your content from thieves.
I woke up early this morning to the sound of banging and scratching coming from my home office. After quickly descending the stairs, I found a total stranger sitting at my desk copying my latest batch of articles. Apparently he’d walked in through the front door, which I’d left unlocked. When he saw me, he said, “Hi, Mike. Love your work. I’m going to publish it too,” and he kept on copying.
Obviously, this didn’t really happen. But if it had, any reasonable person would have dialed 911, because at least one crime was taking place—few people would argue with that. But what if instead of stealing from my home office, the stranger had gone to my website and copied the information directly from it and posted it on his, a practice known as Internet scraping? The response would most likely be quite different—far fewer people would see anything wrong with that, or at least they wouldn’t see it as being that wrong.
The Internet makes it very easy for anyone to copy information from anyone else. And because it’s so easy and because there are billions of pages of information available, few people see the harm in it. But it’s harmful nonetheless when it’s done without permission.
And the type of copying that’s done ranges from the “not so much” to the “practically duplicating all content.” For instance, someone might like how a certain company has drafted its “About Us” page, copy the text, tweak it and paste it on his or her own website. At the other end of the spectrum are companies that have built entire businesses around other companies’ content—they use scraping technology to take information from one website, then they reformat it and display it on their own websites. Either example can cause problems, but not always. It’s tricky.
Copyright Issues
Part of the confusion has to do with how copyright laws are written and how judges have ruled in cases involving alleged Internet copyright infringement. As a content owner, you might assume if the information is displayed on your website and there is a copyright message at the bottom of every page of your site, you’re legally protected. That isn’t always the case.
For you to enforce your rights to certain content, copyright law requires you to be the owner of the content’s copyright, which isn’t the same thing as owning the website. Customer-generated content, such as reviews, videos or images, doesn’t automatically belong to you just because it’s on your website. If you don’t have the copyright to it, you may not have the right to prevent third parties from taking and using it.
