Your Content Without Consent: How to guard against Internet Plagiarism

By Vonetta Booker-Brown


If you’re a small business/marketing professional who writes, then you’re probably aware that creating articles and other content is one of the best ways to market your business and increase your search engine visibility—I can speak from experience! However, a very real downside to this is the increasing amount of plagiarism (when someone takes another’s written work and tries to pass it off on their own) on the Web. Unfortunately, it’s something that’s fairly easy to do, due to the vastness of the Internet. Many plagiarists think, “Sure, I can lift this copy or ‘borrow’ that sentence—who’s really going to find out?”

As a matter of fact, this article comes from an incident that I recently experienced, in which I happened to come across the website of an Alabama-based virtual assistant. To say her site’s copy looked “familiar” would be a gross understatement; lo and behold, as it turned out, this woman’s entire 6-page site was filled with verbatim copy from my website, www.righthandconcepts.com (even down to the interview-style “Frequently Asked Questions” page, where she left my quotes intact and merely replaced my company name with hers!) It was so blatant and absurd, it was almost funny in a twisted, “no, she didn’t!” kind of way.

But plagiarism isn’t a laughing matter—especially when you’ve worked hard to create good copy that informs customers and increases your sales and visibility. Here are some ways that you can guard against it—and what to do if you find someone’s pilfered your content without your consent.

Utilize anti-plagiarism resources. There are a couple of good ones out there; I like to use Copyscape.com (which is how I found out about the woman mentioned above). At this website, you can enter the URL of your choice, and it immediately pulls up any online instances of copy that looks suspiciously similar to yours. You can then go to the site and check further to see whether they’ve actually stolen your copy (it could also be someone whom you’ve granted permission to post your article on their site). Copyscape is free, and also has little “Do Not Copy” banners that you can add to your site’s pages. Although Copyscape can’t prevent plagiarism, it’s a great way to monitor against copy thieves.

Okay—so, let’s say that like me, you unfortunately did come across someone trying to pass your copy off as their own. Now what?

The first line of defense is to let the offending party know that you know what they’ve been up to. In my case, the woman’s name, address, telephone number and email address was right there on her “Contact” page (ironically, the only copy that wasn’t lifted from my site), so I was able to both call and email her, letting her know that I was onto her & to remove my copy (basically, her whole website) immediately. However, some sites may not have the owner’s info readily available. If you can’t find out who owns the site just from browsing it, you may find vital information by doing a WHOIS search of the owner’s domain registration info. This will usually give you a name, address and phone number. (One way to find WHOIS information is by going to NetworkSolutions.com, and clicking on the WHOIS link at the bottom of the page.)

When you locate and contact the individual, let them know that they’ve infringed on your copyrighted material, and to remove it immediately. If it’s an article of yours, however, another option is to have them credit your work appropriately, along with a link back to your website (this gives you more search engine visibility). “Cease and desist” letters are very effective, as well—you can find samples online at the following websites:

http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/contract/cease.htm
http://builder.com.com/5100-31-5082448.html
http://www.webmastertechniques.com/Insight/cease.html
http://www.rightsforartists.com/examcease.html

Although you can send these yourself, it may be more effective if you have your attorney send it. In any case, be sure to copy any other parties you’ve contacted about the matter (i.e. search engines, the offender’s ISP provider, web host, etc.).

What if they don’t comply? In this case, you have a couple of other options: Alert the site’s web host and ISP provider to what’s going on—under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), they are obligated to respond to and remove any proven copyright infringing material. Oh—and don’t forget the search engines—you can also contact whichever ones the offending site appears on; they’re also bound by DMCA. To find guidelines, you can do a Web search on the search engine’s name and “copyright infringement” or “Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” Google’s guidelines, for example, are found at www.google.com/dmca.html.

Another downside (as if there’s an upside!) to Internet plagiarism is that it might sometimes be hard to distinguish whose copy came first, and your own legitimate text could suffer a decrease in search engine ranking (as they don’t take kindly to that sort of thing!). So, it’s important that you support your case with evidence that your web text was indeed online first. Take screen shots of the involved sites, WHOIS records, evidence of when copy was posted, etc.

As I said, unfortunately there’s no surefire way to prevent someone from plagiarizing your copy—but hopefully, these tips will help you shut the offender down. Oh, and in case you’re wondering what became of the woman who lifted my web copy: When I called her on the phone and confronted her, she claimed that she didn’t know about the site and didn’t know how the information got there. (Yeah, right…) Nonetheless, after informing her of my intentions, her site was down within the next hour—pretty quick for someone who didn’t know what I was talking about, huh?

Internet plagiarist depend on the Web’s vastness to help mask their deceit, but a bit of a watchful eye over your content can keep them in check. Good luck!


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© Copyright 2006 Vonetta Booker-Brown. All rights reserved.

Vonetta Booker-Brown is a freelance writer and the owner of home-based virtual assistance practice Right Hand Concepts, in which she provides remote administrative support, copywriting services and web design to businesses & entrepreneurs nationwide. She has written career, fitness, relationship and entertainment articles for various publications, and she also coaches entrepreneurs through her website TheSmallBizHelper.com. Booker-Brown can be reached at vonetta@righthandconcepts.com