3 Steps to Navigating the Copyright Gamut

Posted on 15. Feb, 2010 by Adam in Internet

Picture it: Two weeks ago you wrote what just might be your greatest work.  It’s a masterpiece of a blog post, and before you submit it to the Pulitzer committee, you want to see where it’s ranked on Google, so you enter a unique phrase from the post, and up pops your article – but on someone else’s site, with someone else’s name on it!  And not only are they taking credit for your work, but their site is generating ad revenue, and you’re not seeing a dime of it.

If you’re a writer and something like this hasn’t happened to you yet, chances are, at some point, it will.  Plagiarism runs rampant on the Internet; so much so that both professional writers and entrepreneurs with great website copy to protect can often feel powerless to stop it.  But take heart.  Your work is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), and there are steps you can take to guard your work from those nefarious thieves out to steal your stuff.  Of course it makes sense to put a copyright tagline on your copy, but that’s not enough.  Take these steps to stop plagiarizers in their tracks:

Step 1

Make it easy for people to contact you to get permission to use your work.  In many cases, your copy, or parts of it, might show up on another site simply because the site owner wanted to pass on the great information you provided.  If this is the case, they won’t have changed the byline and might have even given credit to you as the original author.  You want this to happen on your terms though.  Have a policy, whether internal or posted on your pages, which outlines exactly how and under what circumstances you want your work used – always after they’ve gained your permission.  For example, you probably want a link back to your content, rather than a reprint.  Whatever your policy, making it easy for honest folks to learn it is good business.

Step 2

You’ve done what you can to keep the honest people honest, and now you need to find out if your work is being used anyway.  There are some very easy ways to find your work out on the net.  The simplest is to find a unique phrase within your content and do a Google search for it.  (Quotes around a phrase will look for the whole phrase, rather than the individual words within a phrase.)  For example, if this was your post, you might search for, “nefarious thieves out to steal your stuff.”  Chances are, there aren’t a lot of other articles out there with that exact phrase in them.  Another great tool for finding plagiarized work is Copyscape.com.  Just enter the URL for your page into Copyscape, and the site will search for your work, providing a list of sites they find using portions of your copy.  They’ll provide ten results for free.  Their premium service offers content theft protection that will cost you five cents per search and allows you to batch search your entire site and even copy and paste offline content.  Side-Note: You can also use Copyscape to find comment spammers.  Because it searches for all content within your page, if someone is posting the same comment on blogs all over the place, like, “Try this cool dating site at ….com,” it will pick it up as copied material.

Step 3

Ok, you’ve found copyright violations.  People are using your stuff without asking.  What now?  You don’t have to go out and hire a high-priced attorney to fight plagiarizers.  The first thing to do is send a polite but firm and professional email to the site owner.  You can either use the contact information on the site, or do a WHOIS search for the info.  This email is simply a request to remove the content from their site.  Because many who are using others’ content are doing so because they don’t know any better, think of this as an opportunity to educate them.  Be sure to include the URL for the page on their site where the material is located as well as the URL to your original content, and instruct them how to link to your content if they’d like to share it with their site visitors.  Then check back in a week to see if your content is removed.  Usually, this will do the trick.

If you’re clearly not dealing with an amateur, and you suspect they are making a living off of stealing the work of others, or if someone refuses to comply with your request to remove your material from their site, skip right to filing a copyright infringement notice.  This can be filed with Google, and they provide instructions on doing so on their site.  You’ll need to send the notice to Google by snail mail and/or fax.  Google will then send a letter to the copyright infringer on your behalf, which looks something like this.  This is especially effective if the thief is using AdSense, Blogger, or Picassa, as these are Google properties, and they will threaten to deactivate their accounts.  The exact same letter that you send to Google can be used to a violator’s hosting provider and search providers as well.  A sample letter is available on LearnAboutLaw.com.

It’s your work, and you have the right to protect it from those who would profit from it without your permission.  Hopefully these tips will help you do just that – without the cost of lawyers, injunctions, and other such ugliness.   If you’ve had success with other (legal) methods, be sure to let us know!

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