Anyone know who owns/runs ATS.io?

[MJM]

They are stealing images from us in some of their news posts, example:

Our post: https://www.bettingusa.com/virginia-...tting-casinos/

Their post: https://ats.io/news/virginia-becomes...in-2020/33685/

Reached out via email a few days ago with no reply - I guess DMCA would be next, but I don't like to do that because I assume it was fairly innocent and not malicious (ie: grabbing the image from google images). Wondering how others handle this?

[econfox]

I like this from the bottom of the website

2009-2020 ats.io, Inc.All rights reserved. Stop stealing our stuff and ripping off our features, please.

[MJM]

Ha I didn't see that! I found a couple more posts where they took our images too.

[tufty]

There is a downside to telling every webmaster in the same niche to paw all over your website. You think they won't steal images and re-spin content they like?

[Nik0]

I think the rights belong to richmond.com where the original image comes from, you just have added the text. In that case DMCA can turn against you too

[MJM]

We paid for the image in Canva, does that not give us the right to use it? I may not be up to speed on this.

[MJM]

There is a downside to telling every webmaster in the same niche to paw all over your website. You think they won't steal images and re-spin content they like?

Huh?

[tufty]

Huh?

I obviously refer to the other thread you started with 13 x backlinks to your site, asking all your rival webmasters to tell you how to improve it.
I mean, webmasters will forage around anyway, but handing some good copy to spin on a plate can have unintended consequences . . . seen it many times before. Did you actually need the advice anyway? Unlikely.

[MJM]

I obviously refer to the other thread you started with 13 x backlinks to your site, asking all your rival webmasters to tell you how to improve it.
I mean, webmasters will forage around anyway, but handing some good copy to spin on a plate can have unintended consequences . . . seen it many times before. Did you actually need the advice anyway? Unlikely.

Ah, I see what you mean now. That's exactly the reason I've never done a "review my site" thread before, but I really suck at design/cta/nav so I genuinely wanted advice. I suppose everyone knows that site by now anyways - especially within the industry it operates in, and the amount of referrals I see coming in from project management software and the like already tells me plenty use it for inspiration or share it as an example to their writers. I figure it's a compliment, and shady people going to do what shady people do anyways - but your point is well taken. Not sure what I could or should do about it though. Obv you are suggesting to build more links, feel free to link to me (please?) lol.

Now specifically back to when people do stuff like this - do most just ignore it? I've never bothered reporting spammy rewrite type sites (I've never done a DMCA, ever), but this site keeps showing in google news alerts (we are not in g news, and produce MUCH better content).

[tufty]

Now specifically back to when people do stuff like this - do most just ignore it? I've never bothered reporting spammy rewrite type sites (I've never done a DMCA, ever), but this site keeps showing in google news alerts (we are not in g news, and produce MUCH better content).

With regard the image, it is annoying he not only stole the image but also the text you applied to it. That is one lazy b*stard thief, though the poster who queried if it was your copyright may have a point. So I think one solution is to add your logo to any similar images as centrally as you can without it looking silly, so cant be cropped out easily. I had an issue with people stealing a twitter image all the time, so that's what I did, add the logo. It worked to deter lazy toe-rags.

As for text, if they stole the article, the best results I have had is to contact their web host on the basis of a DMCA / copyright infringement. You'd be surprised how effective this can be. They sometimes suspend the site or at the least contact the owner. With things like Wix sites and other 'free' hosting, I've had them delete the site while I was talking to them. Best to contact them by phone I have found. If it is spun content that passes copyscape, it is very hard to do anything. I have reached out to webmasters on this forum before - they probably don't know most times that their writers did a lazy re-spin.

With bot scraped / hacked sites I tend to ignore nowadays as those sites don't tend to last. Policing it madly, as I used to, can increase stress levels.

Cloudflare has various things to help combat bots and bad actors. Some are free and I have also subscribed to some. I reckon it stops plenty but of course plenty of bots and manual scrapers still get through. I even blocked Russia and Ukraine entirely as I dont need that traffic - but I don't know if that is useful, pointless or ill-advised.

[MJM]

Thanks for the very helpful post Tufty. This appears to be an image only issue, so less of a deal than if the content was stolen I guess. Your idea on branding images is a great one.

[ats]

Sorry we never saw your email! I also think your blowing this alittle out of proportion...Its a image...We never stole any content! A extremely basic one at that, you basically took another image that was fair use and added text. Alot of the time we leave the images to the authors who write the article depending if its a short term content piece like this or long term evergreen type content. Google is a great source for images and many from what I know fall under fair use. If your going to get this upset about it I suggest adding a copyright, logo, watermark or whatever to it. To get your panties out of a bunch I will change it up for you.

[MJM]

Sorry we never saw your email! I also think your blowing this alittle out of proportion...Its a image...We never stole any content! A extremely basic one at that, you basically took another image that was fair use and added text. Alot of the time we leave the images to the authors who write the article depending if its a short term content piece like this or long term evergreen type content. Google is a great source for images and many from what I know fall under fair use. If your going to get this upset about it I suggest adding a copyright, logo, watermark or whatever to it. To get your panties out of a bunch I will change it up for you.

I guess I'll just say apology accepted and thanks for changing. I get things like this happen and was a bit annoyed with no response to my email, maybe had a "haven't had my coffee yet" moment, but no big deal. For the record, I had even reached out to a mod shortly after posting this saying I regretted putting it up - knowing we've all had that "i'll just grab a google image" moment as an affiliate and I didn't want to waste much time on it. It was on a challenging day dealing with another site that was actually copying our content, so I lumped it all into one

And you are right, we paid for rights to an image, marked it up to the post title of our content, and used it.

We used to do exactly what you just did - grabbing an image from google images, then we learned a bit about it and started linking for credit, etc, and later on went to paying for Canva Pro to avoid any hassles exactly like this. Thanks for taking care of it. Mods = resolved.


Best of luck.

[ats]

No problem best of luck with your site.

[econfox]

I don't think anyone needs to apologize for this thread. It worked out the way it should and this is one of the reasons I come to this site. If this forum didn't exist then things would just get escalated.

If you have been doing this for more than a couple of years then your content has been scraped by someone.

I would say that if you really want to keep your images for only your site then you need to put your logo or website name on them. I tried watermarks but I didn't like the look so this year I will be adding my logo to the corner of my images.

[Sherlock]

Not that I downplay happy endings, but long time ago I hoped that on the forum we can resolve affiliate vs. affiliate program problems.
Actually just my first post and problem with bet365 was resolved and that was it.