IT Today Blog Fighting Website Plagiarism
| Fighting Website Plagiarism |
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| Written by Rick Laymance |
| Thursday, 03 July 2008 20:57 |
As any business owner (or artist, dreamer, "computer nerd", etc.) will tell you, having a website is a big deal. You spend a lot of time making sure the design is just right, the images look just perfect, and the text says just the right thing. Building a website can be a months long project. Being the owner of a website can bring you pride, joy, and a sense of satisfaction. But that sense of satisfaction can quickly fade away when you discover that someone else has copied the contents of your site without your approval! It should be noted that anytime that you write ANYTHING, it is copyrighted. Anytime you create graphics or take pictures, etc., it is copyrighted! You can file a few forms and register for a copyright, that however is not necessary in order for it to be illegal when someone steals (copies or reproduces) the things that you have created. So, just to make sure it is crystal clear; any written text, drawings, paintings, graphics, computer software, photographs, etc. that you yourself create - is covered by copyright laws. As with red lights, stop signs, and speed limits, just because there is a law doesn't mean that it is followed. You can rest assured that if you have content that is of interest to someone else, it will end up on someone else's site. It has even happend to LDS, while researching for this article I found (using the tool mentioned below) five other sites who have taken our privacy policy word for word. So how do I know if someone has performed copyright infringement by copying my content? Finding your infringed content sometimes happens by accident. Content stolen from a electrician's website usually will end up on another electrician's website... one that you may come across naturally. There are also tools available to search for copyright infringement. One such tool is called Copyscape (www.copyscape.com). Copyscape is laid out a lot like the google search engine. Instead of searching for phrases, you enter your web address; Copyscape will compare your website to millions of other websites and display any sites that have your content on them. When you click on the returned results, it will show the other site with the offending text highlighted. Copyscape is a free service, but they do have a Copysentry service that you can pay for which will automatically (without you having to initiate it) compare your site on regular intervals and email you the results. So how can you keep the contents of your site safe? What can you do when someone STEALS your content (and yes it is stealing)? 1. Contact the website owner. Visit their website and look for a contact page, or a phone number or email address somewhere on the site (be sure to check the footer of the site). If you cannot find contact information on their site, try performing a whois lookup on their domain name. For those of you who use Mac computers, simply open a terminal window and type in "whois domain.com" and press enter, you'll see their whois record. For Windows users, you can visit the site whois.net and perform a search there. If the person's contact information is not listed in the whois record, there should be something listed there about their hosting provider. You can try contacting them to get to the website owner. Most hosting providers will (with proof) actually shut down an offending website. 2. Send a cease and desist order. If step one didn't make a difference, your next step should be to send a cease and desist order via email and the postal service. Be sure to send the order via registered mail so that the person has to sign for the letter and there is proof that they did receive it. Don't hire a lawyer to create the letter - do a simple search on Google for "cease and desist order" and it should return plenty of examples which you can then modify to meet your needs. Please note that you should only use samples from websites that are offering them free to the public, otherwise you would be performing copyright infringement yourself. Make it look as professional as possible, and include a date by which the offending material must be removed.  3. If that doesn't work, send a cease and desist order to the website's hosting provider. Most hosting providers take this very seriously and will most likely suspend the website until the owner removes the infringing material. You can find the hosting provider's information by doing a "whois" lookup on the domain name as described above.4. The "Nuclear Option". If the above three steps do not work, you can request that the offending website be removed from the Internet's search engines via the "DMCA" - Digital Millenium Copyright Act. For more information, just do a web search on DMCA. You will have to make the request directly to each of the search engines, and the procedure may be a little different for each - some require that you specify the exact search phrase that is bringing up the offending site, etc. Once you make this request, the search engine will remove the offending site from it's databases and flag it to keep it from being included in the future. This is a sure fire way to get results from the website owner, because removing search engine traffic is like turning off the "web" water faucet. 5. The last straw. If all of the above options do not bring you satisfaction, then you can always file a lawsuit against the owners of the offending website. You would need to consult a lawyer for more information concerning this option. One More Step to Protect Yourself In order to provide proof that your content was created first and was created by you, it is a good idea to keep copies of your website material as well as dates that the content was created, as well as the date when it was published. This will ensure that you have proof of infringment if the other person claims that they posted their material first.
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| Last Updated ( Sunday, 03 August 2008 08:11 ) |
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