A splog stole my content! Now what?

When I started offering full text rss feeds, I knew that I was putting my content at risk for easy theft. I received a google alert for my keyword on a website I didn't recognize. When I checked it out I found a splog that had my last few posts on the website. Eventually, I got the content removed. Being successful, I thought that the steps I took might be of interest to others who have had their content stolen.

1. The first step was of course finding out that my content was stolen. I'll again direct you to Kate's brilliant tactic on prevening rss scrapes for details.
2. My second step was to search around the website for an email address or contact page. I could not find one.
3. My third step was that I left a comment on each post of mine that was stolen. I said, "Stop stealing my content you are commiting a crime by doing so." I then left a link to the original post.
4. Unfortunately, the comments required moderation. I waited 4 days and nothing happened. I decided to go after his hosting company.
   
5. I opened up a command prompt(start-> run-> type "cmd"-> press enter
6. I pinged the domain name to get the IP address of the website (ping domain.com)
7. Once I had the IP address, I went to this website and typed in the IP address and got the information on the name of the company that owned it.
8. I googled the name of the company and found their website. The company was indeed a web hosting company.
9. I located their "terms and conditions" page and discovered they posting copyrighted material was against their rules.
10. I found the company's "abuse" email address and wrote them an email explaining the situation. I included links to the offending content as well as links to the original content. I asked that they contact the owner and have the owner remove the content, or, failing that, take down the website as he was violating their own terms and conditions.
11. A day and a half later the content was removed. I sent a follow up email to the webhosting company thanking them for their help.

I never received a follow up email from anyone, so I don't know if it was the webhosting company contacting the owner, or it was the comments that I left that eventually prompted the offending content being removed. I don't know if following these steps will work for everyone, but they did work for me. Hopefully, they'll work for you too.