Making Money off Content Thieves and Using Copyscape to Find Them

I've heard of Copyscape before but never checked them out until recently. If you don't know, Copyscape is a program that takes a URL then searches Google to see if content at that URL exists somewhere else online.

The primary use of Copyscape is to find other websites that have stolen your content, specifically unique articles and original thoughts or ideas carefully crafted and placed online by you.

The Reason:

Google gives your site a lot of credit for having unique content, the more unique content you have, the more value Google will place on your site. If someone steals your content and places it on their site, the content is no longer unique and your ranking at Google will suffer (or worse yet, disappear into the "supplemental" index). This should be a very good reason to go after content thieves and protect your hard work.

All this got me thinking... eventually people are going to rip off content no matter what and there's nothing I can do to prevent it. My website is out there, the text is out there, and anyone viewing it can copy and paste whether I like it or not.

So... my idea is to let them do it. In fact, I'll even promote it. With Copyscape I can find the offenders at any time I like and while a nasty gram from a lawyer might relieve some anger, here's a different approach:

Once someone steals your content and places it on their own website, lookup the website owner at www.whois.sc and note their email address. You want to send them an email pointing out the violation of copyright laws, ask them to remove the content immediately, and then offer to have the content re-written for a fee if they wish to use it.

Re-Written for a Fee?!

Yup! What else are we going to do when this happens? Get mad and waste money on lawyers? Accept it and take the hit on our Google rankings? Give up and join the circus? Come to think of it, the circus might work...

About the only real solution I have here is to try and turn a negative into a positive by charging the content thieves money. I mean why not? If we came up with the content in the first place, we can most likely re-write it, and if we paid someone else, hopefully they'd be willing to re-write it too. And if you aren't worried about the duplicate content issue, charge the webmaster to use an "authorized copy" of the article. People pay for stuff when it's "authorized". =)

Come to think of it, maybe this is a way to get lots of free content for your site... Pay someone $10 to write an article, post it online and wait for someone to steal it, email the content thief and offer to re-write the article for $15 (or let them use a copy for $10), rinse and repeat.

Maybe it'd work, maybe not. I guess it doesn't hurt to try and any day you can turn something bad in your favor is a good day.