Who is copying your content?

Copyscape is a search engine that attempts to help you find people who are stealing your content without permission. Put in your URL, and you can find people who might be republishing your sites content so you can sic the dogs on them I guess.

I tried it out for Teach42.com and it did find a scum sucking link blog that republished a post of mine about Twitter. The other instances it found were totally legit (a few people who have set it as a favorite of theirs in Technorati and such).

However, what’s much less clear is what you can do about it. They suggest putting one of their banners on your blog to ‘protect yourself’, but I fail to see what that accomplishes. Most of the time, bots stealing your content have no idea what that content actually is. So are they really going to see that banner and get all shaky in their virtual knees? Somehow, I just don’t see it deterring potential plagarists.

However, I do think they’ve got a pretty solid list of steps you can take if someone IS stealing your content.

1. Look for contact details on the offending site and send a polite message asking for the material to be removed. If there are no contact details available, try emailing webmaster@ the domain.

2. Use a Whois service to find out the website owner’s name and telephone number and contact them directly. Enter the domain name in the search box and the contact information should appear towards the bottom of the page.

3. Contact the web hosting company used by the site and inform them of their customer’s abuse. This information is also available through a Whois search.

4. Send a formal ‘Cease and Desist’ letter notifying the offending party that they must remove the stolen content from their site. Some sample letters are available on the web.

5. File a notice of Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement with search engines such as Google and others to have the offending site removed from their search results.

6. If you need proof of infringement, you can use the Internet Archive to show that the content appeared on your site at an earlier date than it appeared on the offending site.

Personally, if they really want to get people to subscribe to their premium service, I’d suggest they offer to automate some of those services, like steps 5 and 6. But that’s just my two cents.

3 Comments

Claudia Ceraso
5/8/2007

This is a Web 2.0 issue. I feel few teachers blog about this.
I agree with you about the search engine. I wonder how useful that service would be. Too analogical, perhaps.

Here is another blogger telling her experience on plagiarism and how she applied the steps you mention in your post. I think it gives interesting tips.
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/dealing-with-website-plagiarism-when.html

One thing I am noticing is that bloggers in Spanish sometimes translate almost complete posts from bloggers in English. It is rare to find a mention of having contacted the author for permission to translate or reproduce such a long quote.

The machine is using us, I guess.

Claudia Ceraso
5/8/2007

At teach42 blog reading and commenting on the issue of plagiarism. http://tinyurl.com/29ysvl

Aaron Smith
5/9/2007

I suppose the first thing that comes to mind here is that my stuff is all under a Creative Commons License. If they’re not making any money off of it, I’m actually OK with it. (Being a shameless self-promoter, I link to my own projects so often that I’d still get plugged.)

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