Content Plagiarism: How to prevent and act upon it?

Did someone copied your website and all you seems to be able to do is pull your hair and feel hopeless? Don’t worry! This article will guide you towards taking some proactive measures and steps to handle the situation if you are a victim of content plagiarism.

First lets understand what content plagiarism means. There are two things about making a copy of your website. One is imitating the graphics, artwork and second is reproducing the content from your website to other website with or without any modification.

Now let’s look at some proactive measures that should prevent plagiarism to a certain extent. The later section of this article will discuss about steps you need to take after your site has been ripped.

Proactive steps to prevent people from ripping your website:

1. The first thing to do is put up a copyright section on your site that will detail all the legal actions that your company will take upon, in case someone rips your website or its content. It doesn’t work 100% of the time but makes people think twice before they try to copy your website.
2. Use a free content plagiarism checker service such as one from Copyscape that will tell you if your content has been copied on a website so that you can send copyright infringement notices to people who copy your content. Detecting plagiarism is now a bit easy with such services.
3. Place a plagiarism warning banner on every content page of your website that will make people think before they steal your content. Plagiarism prevention is better than resolving it.
4. Every page of your site must have a visible link to the copyright section of your website; as mentioned in step 1.

Steps to take when you know that your content has been stolen:

1. The first thing to do is to contact the website owner directly by email or phone. You can look up the contact details of the website that has stolen your content from their contact page or by using the domain whois search and then send an email or call the owner of the domain. This step resolves the matter most of the time.
2. In case you are unable to locate the contact information of the website, try to contact the hosting company that hosts the website and inform them about the content abuse. You can find out about the hosting company from whois database of the offending website.
3. Next step is send a ‘Cease and Desist‘ letter to the website owner asking them to remove the stolen content from their website. You can obtain a letter from your attorney or search Internet for some sample letters.
4. As a last resort, file a notice of DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) infringement with search engines requesting them to remove the offending website from their index. Search engine such as Google take such notices very seriously but you will need to provide them with proof that the original content was published first on your website. You can use Internet archive for this purpose.

If you have not put up a copyright section in your website yet, that would be the first thing to do now that you have read through this post. As always, please feel free to post your comments in the comments section below.
[tags]Content Plagiarism, Plagiarism Prevention, Hosting, Internet[/tags]