Easily accessible content, hugeness of internet and Uninformed webmasters make the field ready for online copyright violators to steal and take advantage of hard gained uniquely created content of other’s website for their own evil purpose without spending any time and money.
Copyright Violation (sometimes is referred as Plagiarism) is one of the biggest problems of today’s internet business founders.
If you are one of the thousands of webmasters, spent lots of time and money to create unique fresh content exclusively for your site, but after a while found hundreds of unauthorized copies of your hand-written article, taking away the value of its uniqueness and changing it to a spam content, keep reading, this is for you.
First of all you need to know what parts of your website can be and what parts can’t be protected under Copyright law?
Writings, Artwork and photographs you own on your website are all subject to copyright protection but names, facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation are not applicable for such protection.
What next ?
Make sure you have a copyright statement on all the pages you want to protect. If there is any separate include file for footer, it’s a wise idea to put it there so that it will be applied sitewide.
To find other copies of your work you can either use a copyright scan tool (i.e. Copyscape.com) or just use Google !
Yes Google is enough if you know how to use it. Here is a simple instruction:
Select a random parts of your article containing 5-6 words, put it in double quotes and search for it on Google.
For example if I want to search for copies of this article I may search for “statement on all the pages you want” including double-quotes as one of my attempts!
Repeat the process for 3-4 random parts of your article.
In case you’ve found unauthorized copies, there are steps to follow! Legal action is your last solution because most of the times the problem can be resolved a lot easier and even with a single but strong and clear email to the webmaster of the site.
Most of webmasters don’t like their site being suspended so they will remove that content as soon as they receive your notice.
If you couldn’t find webmaster’s email address on their site, you can get the domain whois data using a domain whois lookup service.(i.e. Whois.sc )
Already did this and the content is still up?
The next step is to get more serious and contact their web hosting service provider. You can usually find the website’s hosting provider by checking the nameservers on domain’s whois data. If the violator is not a site but a blog on blogspot.com, blogger.com, etc. you have a longer but straighter way as there are certain steps stated clearly on their terms of service, copyright act page.(i.e. this page)
Making the violator’s life a little harder.
If the violator used Google Adsense or any other similar programs on your stolen content (usually they do), you can report the violation to Google (or the advertiser network used) based on information and steps on advertiser network’s website. (For Google Adsense, here is the information: Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Google AdSense)
Usually these actions are more than enough but if for any reason, the issue is not resolved yet then you should start the legal process that usually takes some time and money.
More information about Legal process can be found here.
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