Fancy you’ve just read a couple of posts providing good pieces of advice on how to hinder plagiarists from filching your content. While putting the tips into practice, you realize that you are also among those miserable attacked by content-thieves. Which means, that you should put implementation of all precautions aside and switch to other actions able to deter the cheaters.
So, what could be done to tackle the problem? Let’s suggest a number of measures to be taken by the victims. The list won’t include all the possible solutions and strongly recommended legal advice though. However it shall embrace some of the most essential tips, which you may follow once you find them appropriate.
Well, here it is:
Collecting Evidence
Before filing any plagiarism complaints, you’d better make sure, that your copyright was really infringed. Thanks to Webmaster Tools it becomes possible. You may find the list of the domains that cited you or linked to you, as well as the total number of the links made. The next step is to click the most suspicious ones and see whether the content published there was taken from you paying close attention to the proper attribution of your source.
To facilitate the process you can use plagiarism checkers able to verify urls/texts for duplications or similarities and save you a great deal of time.
It’s advisable to screenshot the website pages containing your content, so that its url could be clearly seen too. This way you will make your request to remove plagiarized posts sound more well-grounded.
Well, now it’s high time to compose an email and address it straight to the offender provided you found his/her contact details, of course. The structure of the email should be quite simple including: the website address where you found plagiarized content, the headline of the ripped off post, the link to the original source, your name and contact information (this email may serve you as another proof should the thief disagree to take away stolen content or simply ignore your request).
No Response? It’s Not A Problem!
In the worst-case-scenario, you’ve got a few more severe methods of making the cheater settle the matter. One of them is to contact webmasters or website hosting services and send the same kind of message described above noting that previous attempts to get in touch with the offender failed permanently.
If you experience any difficulties with reaching the site administration or web hosting service, you can make use of web hosting search tool, like http://www.whoishostingthis.com or http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp. In case the domain information isn’t shown to the public, you may do the following:
“…you can use a simple Google Chrome plugin called Rapportive and a few minutes of trial and error to find out someone’s email address” [1]
If everything mentioned before doesn’t work, you may contact search engines, e.g.:
- Google via this web address: https://support.google.com,
- Microsoft via https://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyrtInfrg.aspx,
- Yahoo via https://info.yahoo.com/copyright/us/details.html, [2]
or file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint right on the site of the web hosting service or via some automatic resources like this one – http://automattic.com/dmca-notice/.
Hope all these measures will help you deal with copyright infringement problem successfully!
Be Hot On The Trail
After the battle is won, you may get back to safety measures able to reduce the risks of being plagiarized again. This is a shortlist you may take advantage of:
- introduce restrictions into the display options of your website,
- disable right-click function,
- forbid or limit access to your site for those IPs, which tend to lift large portions of your content,
- make use of Google alerts or your own CMS’s notifications,
- create Google Authorship account,
- install plug-ins able to trace plagiarists,
- apply RSS script.
As for the last option, there is something important to be mentioned:
“Adding a customized RSS script ensures that the link to your original article is reposted automatically when someone lifts your content and puts it up elsewhere.” [3]
Well, to confront plagiarism proves to be a tough job, but doing nothing at all to stop it from happening will cause us much more harm indeed.
Thus let’s prepare to fight!
Source:
- with regard to Google Chrome plugin: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/internet-content-theft
- with regard to filing search engine complaints: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/internet-content-theft
- with regard to RSS script: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/find-remove-stolen-content/