How to Deal With Online Copyright Infringement – Find And Report Content Theft
How often do you find your articles or blog posts lifted by plagiarists and reposted elsewhere without permission, backlinks, and no credits whatsoever? And how often do you find your articles republished with another byline? Too often? I should think so. While you can take some measures to prevent having your online content stolen, it’ll happen sooner or later anyway, so you’d better be prepared. Here are some practical tips on how to identify as well as handle online copyright infringement.How to Find Your Plagiarized Web Content
Other than information occasionally posted in writers’ forums, private e-mails from fellow scribes, or Twitter RT requests notifying of plagiarizing sites, there’s not much you’ll ever simply learn by accident. You may need to check and track your stats carefully to see which of your articles/blog posts seem to be under-performing lately in terms of page views and then google the first sentences to see if they pop up on other web pages. You should also follow your backlinks to see how much of your content was quoted elsewhere. Apart from that, there are a few online apps that help find plagiarized content — they won’t take you all the way, but they may save you loads of time.
Google alerts – you can request custom e-mails from google whenever a specific word or phrase (such as your name and/or pen name – for you to determine) is found by google crawlers. Those who copy your articles along with the byline will be reported to you directly.
FairShare – is a free online service allowing of tracking your urls through feeds and receiving reports about how others are using your content.
Copyscape – is a free service (and one of my favorite anti-plagiarism tools) which scans internet for duplicate content based on one url.
Ways to File a Copyright Infringement Complaint
You can do at least four things depending on the circumstances:
Confront the content thief – if possible, contact the infringing party directly and request removal of your content, a paraphrase followed by a backlink to your original, or even monetary compensation. Don’t seek revenge by spamming or stalking the plagiarist – some people steal content due to ignorance rather than bad will and may comply immediately. Staying civil is important also because you may need to forward all your correspondence to a third-party organization like google or yahoo in case communication between you and the content thief is, to put it mildly, unsuccessful.
Send a Cease and Desist Order to the administrator(s) of the site in question using their contact form, comments section or simply a forum post – whatever you think will work best for your case. In case of blogger blogs lacking contact information, you can head straight to google – they will take all stolen content down in a matter of hours.
File a complaint to the host of the site in question – you can use your browser add-ons to find information on the host’s contact details from their whois database, alexa, or a similar service and proceed with the Cease and Desist Order. You should attach any and all data gathered in the process of communicating with the thief — urls of original as well as copied articles, copies of correspondence, your contact details, etc.
File a complaint to advertisers and search engines – publishers who post copyrighted material without authorization are violating the TOS of advertising and affiliate marketing parter programs and can be penalized by them:
Report copyright infringment to google adsense – they have their own online form called “Google AdSense DMCA complaint form” and you can find more information about Digital Millennium Copyright Act here. I’ve used this option previously with some funny article directories and it worked quite well; so go hit them where it hurts.
Request a ban from search engines – you can use this option as a last resort. Make sure you send them all your evidence and data as described in the above points, or else they may not consider your complaint as lacking proof and/or data — they won’t do any research for you.
Discourage Online Content Theft
If you come across habitual plagiarists – bloggers, writers, article directories, etc. — you can give them the publicity they deserve:
Post information in writers’ forums, networks and groups -you can help other writers find their copyrighted content and you can help your case if they follow with complaints regarding the same publisher.
Use social media to spread the word – you can find some support on Twitter requesting RTs of your alerts about plagiarizing publishers using both @mention tweets and #hashtag tweets to reach the plagiarist as well as other writers.
Use your own blog – post an entry every time you find your article to be stolen; writers often google information about websites before they decide to write for them, you can help giving the infringing website a results page it totally deserves. Short, simple, well-keyworded titles are your friend.
Who Steals Online Content and Why?
Today websites are in bad need of content — preferably well-optimized, well-written, frequent and free. It’s really tempting to grab a post or two from a random blog when your only alternative is to spend hours researching, writing and SEO copywriting your own articles, or paying upfront fees to capable writers who charge per word. However, it’s not just random “scrapers” or plagiarists who try to benefit from your writing for free.
Many writing and editing professionals lacking knowledge in the department of writing online and, what follows, laws governing copyright issues on the internet go as far as to think they’re doing you a favor, because they “recognized” your talent and knowledge. Some, like the ill-famed Judith Griggs, even think it’s you who owes them money for rewritting your recipe article for a print publication. Others, like the above-mentioned University of Michigan, think it’s okay to cook up a copypasta dish using your stuff, because they don’t have adsense ads anywhere on their sidebars and the only consumers of your generously donated knowledge are poor students. Whether they’re making money or not, you sure as hell are losing it.
