I had a run in with a content scraper not long ago, and as far as I was concerned, won as he stopped scraping my site. However, the email I sent to the Adsense team was not as well received. They take the easy out:

Google is a provider of information, not a mediator. We serve ads targeted to certain web pages, but we don’t control the content of these pages. For these kinds of questions or comments, it is best to directly address the webmaster of the page in question.

To get results, you need to bring in some legal muscle:

However, it is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office website: lcWeb.loc.gov/copyright/) and other applicable intellectual property laws. In this case, this means that if we receive proper notice of infringement, we will forward that notice to the responsible web site publisher.

They want this physically mailed to the following address:

Google, Inc.
Attn: AdSense Support, DMCA complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043

Now, I’m all for due process, but couldn’t there be a less formal procedure? It should be enough for them to go to a scraper site, see my stolen content, and revoke the publisher’s account.

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