How to Check if your Web Copy has been Stolen
This is even more prevalent than you might think. It happens in a number of ways:
1) Copying and pasting your content and sticking their name on it
2) Making slight changes to your content and claiming it as their own
You should be vigilant about copy theft – any long term blogger will tell you that it happens all of the time. This can happen straight from your blog, or copy you've put into your website builder. Remember, this is not a case of "if" someone steals your content, it's a matter of "when" they do. If you create a blog, or create an online forum and post regularly you might find that you are a particular target of content theft.
A spam blogger is called, unsurprisingly, a splogger. Sploggers scrape legitimate content from other websites for use on their own. They will often target keyword-rich SEO material to improve their own page rank. Or they may steal a particularly well-crafted, well thought out article to pass off as their own.
How do I detect if my copy has been stolen?
Did you know that many Universities, Schools and Colleges use Google for basic plagiarism detection. It's a free tool that you can use just as easily. Just copy a sentence from your work, paste it into Google's search bar (inside quotation marks) and press enter. If someone has copy and pasted straight from your website this is a quick and easy method to find it.
2. Trackbacks
A great trick for catching copyright infringement is to use trackbacks. Include an internal link to another article on your site – if your content is directly picked up and used somewhere else you will receive a trackback notification for the article that you linked to. This is a simple thing to do that can make it very easy to keep track of content theft from your business website or blog.
3. Copyscape
Copyscape is a tool that is used to check for plagiarism. Type in your URL and let Copyscape check across the internet to see if that content has been plagiarized anywhere. If you are a commercial enterprise you might want to sign up for the Copyscape premium service. This allows you to check the content of your articles before you put them into your website builder – if you have other people writing articles or blogs for you it can be a great tool.
What Should I Do If My Copy Has Been Stolen?
If the person ignores, or if they are hosted on a service like Blogger or WordPress or another website builder, the next step is to send a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint. You can send it to the following places:
1) Copying and pasting your content and sticking their name on it
2) Making slight changes to your content and claiming it as their own
You should be vigilant about copy theft – any long term blogger will tell you that it happens all of the time. This can happen straight from your blog, or copy you've put into your website builder. Remember, this is not a case of "if" someone steals your content, it's a matter of "when" they do. If you create a blog, or create an online forum and post regularly you might find that you are a particular target of content theft.
A spam blogger is called, unsurprisingly, a splogger. Sploggers scrape legitimate content from other websites for use on their own. They will often target keyword-rich SEO material to improve their own page rank. Or they may steal a particularly well-crafted, well thought out article to pass off as their own.
How do I detect if my copy has been stolen?
Did you know that many Universities, Schools and Colleges use Google for basic plagiarism detection. It's a free tool that you can use just as easily. Just copy a sentence from your work, paste it into Google's search bar (inside quotation marks) and press enter. If someone has copy and pasted straight from your website this is a quick and easy method to find it.
2. Trackbacks
A great trick for catching copyright infringement is to use trackbacks. Include an internal link to another article on your site – if your content is directly picked up and used somewhere else you will receive a trackback notification for the article that you linked to. This is a simple thing to do that can make it very easy to keep track of content theft from your business website or blog.
3. Copyscape
Copyscape is a tool that is used to check for plagiarism. Type in your URL and let Copyscape check across the internet to see if that content has been plagiarized anywhere. If you are a commercial enterprise you might want to sign up for the Copyscape premium service. This allows you to check the content of your articles before you put them into your website builder – if you have other people writing articles or blogs for you it can be a great tool.
What Should I Do If My Copy Has Been Stolen?
- Contact the webmaster/blogger with a firm but polite email telling them that you hold the copyright to that content and that they are in breach of that copyright. If you are dealing with someone who has made an honest mistake they will probably take the content down without too many problems – they may even be a bit embarrassed about it! If you are dealing with a serial splogger they are very likely to just ignore you.
- Send a cease and desist order. It's quite possible that the website which is breaching your copyright will have no contact details appearing on that website. However, you can find out who the webmaster is by using the handy WHOIS lookup tool. This will tell you who someone is. Just insert the domain name and you'll be able to find out that person's address and/or email address and you can send them a letter directly.
If the person ignores, or if they are hosted on a service like Blogger or WordPress or another website builder, the next step is to send a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint. You can send it to the following places:
- Search Engines – to have that site removed from search engines
- The website hosting company – you should be able to see this in the WHOIS information
- Blogger, WordPress, Yahoo Answers etc – directly to the company to request that the content be removed (this may take a number of weeks).
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