I was checking my Google rankings last week for some terms that I normally don’t look at, and as usual I saw that Rentals.com had the number #1 spot, however something caught my eye in Rentals.com’s result.
In the snippet of the Rentals.com result something looked very familiar. After reading it twice, I said to myself, “Hey, I wrote that.” The next thought in my head was, “Oh, Google must have screwed up some how and put my text there - there is no way Rentals.com would have copied it.”
So I went to the actual page on the Rentals.com site and then pulled up the corresponding page on my site and sure enough an entire paragraph had been copied word-for-word from my site.
I had to call my wife over and have her look at it, perhaps I was missing something. She saw the same thing. So odd to see a large company copy from a small one, typically it is the other way around.
My next thought was, “Wow, I wonder how long”. So using the WayBack Machine I noticed that it had been copied as far back as August or perhaps earlier than that.
To be honest I was not mad or upset, mostly curious how this could have happened. I have never filed a DMCA against anyone before because you can usually never find the person to file it against, so I thought calling Rentals.com directly would be the best course of action.
So I picked up the phone and dialed Rentals.com (that felt strange). I had a conversation with an employee of Rentals.com.
The person I spoke with was nice and told me action would be taken right away. Sure enough and hour or so later the content was gone.

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7 users responded in this post
Looks like big brother got caught with their hands in the cookie jar!
Care to comment on what it was you discovered? Its absolutely eating at me!
Mark,
If you like I can share a screen shot from the Rentals.com site if you like, just shoot me an email.
Dave
[...] This time I am going to show a screen shot because they didn’t even try to hide it. Every single line on that page is mine! For some reason this time I am much madder about this than when Rentals.com stole my content. [...]
there is a website you can go to for free and you can see if any one is using your content and images -i will look for it and i will send it to you so you can post it
http://www.copyscape.com
Also, good info here:
http://itscopyrighted.com/resources/index.htm
i see that robbie has given the website to you copyscape -thats the one i use no one has copied anything i wrote yet mostly because i cant spell lol