Blog Design Studio

I’m sure you wouldn’t like to see someone steal stuff from your house, similarly blog posts for bloggers, photos for a photographer, poems for a poet, music for a musician is their asset and if someone copies that and claims that it’s their own creation then it’s nothing less than stealing or is simply called Plagiarism.

Unfortunately many people don’t understand the fact that this is stealing and is illegal too. There are few reasons for that and I would like to clarify them over here :

1. Lack of awareness : Many people who get online aren’t aware of the copyrights and think that what is available on the internet and doesn’t have a price tag is free of cost (for many even that’s not the boundary, thanks to pirates!) and is available for anyone to use the way they want.

2. Cyber laws aren’t strict : Not every country has strict cyber laws and that allows many people to get away from any legal stuff and that’s a very sorry state of affair. However, things are changing fast and many countries have started to revise their cyber laws and have started to favor bloggers, writers, musicians etc.

3. Careless attitude : There are many people on the internet who are aware of the copyrights but still don’t care because they either know the loopholes or just believe in reacting to the situation, so even though they know that what they are doing is wrong, they’ll continue to do it until they get any legal notice and then will work accordingly.

Note : This post will help you fight against blog post copiers and unfortunately doesn’t discuss about image and music related content.

Lets see that how can we fight against Plagiarism :

There are two types of copiers -

1) The one who copy with hard work – There are copiers who will do the hard work in copying the content and will make slight changes in the content and will remove all the links from the post to ensure that you as the original writer of the content won’t get notified.

2) The lazy ass : There are many people who’ll simply run RSS aggregators and will start copying content from your blog automatically and without doing any thing at all.

How to track that someone is stealing your content -

1. Include links in your blog posts : It’s a good practice to include links to your old posts regularly. That way if any RSS aggregator is copying your content then you’ll get notified pretty easily as you’ll be able to see the linkbacks appearing in your WordPress blog’s dashboard.

2. Copyright information and link to your home page : Include the copyright information and include a linkback to your homepage at the bottom of every post. You can use Feed Layout plugin to do that automatically. That way you’ll get the notified through WordPress dashboard.

3. Include a unique identifier : It’s a good practice to include a unique combination of numbers and alphabets in your blog posts or feeds because if someone will copy the content then that unique key will also appear at the copied place and then you can search for that particular key on any of the major search engines (read : google) and Digital Fingerprint is an excellent plugin to help you in automating the task.

4. Copyscape : It’s an excellent service which helps you in tracking the copiers and saves a lot of your time in finding the thieves. There is a premium service available for it too and if you want detailed information and advanced tracking then you can always have a look at the paid options.

I found the thief, how can I combat against him -

1. Contact the person : It’ll be the best approach to contact the person in question and inform them that they’ve copied the content from your that particular URL and that you hold the rights. Give them the option of removing the post from their server or ask them to credit you and that they should only use excerpts and not the full post of yours.

Keep in mind that when you are contacting them at first, keep your tone subtle and be polite.

2. Warn them about the consequences : In case they don’t respond to your request positively then shoot another mail and tell them about the consequences of their offense. Inform them that this could result in ban of their hosting account, advertising network account etc. However, never abuse because you can use those emails later as proof in case things go too far.

3. Send DMCA letter to web host, search engines & Ad networks : In case the person still doesn’t respond positively then you can simply send a DMCA letter (mock letters) to webhost, search engines and ad networks and wait for them to take action against the culprit.

One blog which focuses on fight against Plagiarism is Plagiarism Today by Jonathan Bailey and has helped me a lot in learning about Copyrights and how to fight sploggers and I recommend the blog to every blogger.

Image credit : CheeseBikini