Plagiarism and content stealth: how to deal with it on the web?

The fear of losing one’s content bothers bloggers, site owners, photographers, digital artists and other content creators. Besides, videos and music world is deeply concerned with piracy of their creations.

We’d deal here with what constitutes content stealth and what can be done by common content creators, such as bloggers, who do not have the might of big movie producers, YouTube, etc.

Blogs and other websites are inherently prone to content theft

Once you are on the web and your content is worth stealing (good articles, photos, infographics, quotes, podcasts and videos), there will always be people (thieves) wanting to steal your content and pose it as their own. In some cases, it would be just for bragging about their talent but mostly it is for making money out of it. In some cases, it would be an innocent lift, but in most cases it’s deliberate. In some cases, it would be lifting of a small para with some form of attribution; in most cases it would be outright lifting and pocketing credit/ money.
 
 That does not mean, you should allow everybody to re-use your content, that too at your cost. There are ways to prevent that and to take action when it hurts.

Is your blog/ website’s content really stolen?

Not all copying of content and its re-use is stealing. There are many occasions when the content can be legally and legitimately re-used, sometimes even without attribution and permission. These are called ‘fair use’ practices. For example, a person reviewing your book is likely to copy-paste in his review a small para or a quotable quote from the book. Someone talking about your product on a review site may like to exactly quote you for the claims you make about the product. Similarly, giving a thumbnail of your art work or book cover, reproducing a stanza from your poem, copy-pasting your floor plan to illustrate how good or bad the flat being sold by you is — all such instances are fair use of your content by others.
 
 The term ‘Fair Use’ is not easy to define and so even courts rule on copyright infringement matters on case to case basis. However, it is always better to err on the right side on such matters.

How much of your content is being stolen and by whom?

You can use a number of tools, some free and some paid, to find out who is scraping your content and where he is using it.
 
 If you search for “plagiarism check” or “check copy paste content online” on Google, you’d find a large number of paid tools that search copy-pasted content for you, but we are in no position to suggest one of them.
 
 
 The next step would be to make a table of all suspicious scrapers and keep checking them over a period and for different posts.

Is a fight with content thieves worth it?

If majority of cases of re-use of your content relate to genuine use (even slight abuse) of your content, forget it. Be alarmed if you find your content landing on suspicious sites or you are being wrongly quoted or you feel that the reuse is harming you by diverting your traffic or ranking higher on search engines than your original work or people are buying the duplicate work or search traffic is going down because you are being penalized for duplicate content, or in some other way.

Take on the content thief if stakes are high

If you are convinced that plagiarism is hurting you and you must take corrective action, you can proceed as follows:
 
 1. Keep proof ready. 
 
 2. Contact them. 
 
 3. If the response is not up to the mark, firmly tell him to take the steps in a time-bound manner and warn him of steps you might take. 
 
 4. If he doesn’t listen or shouts back, you can complaint about him to search engines and his web-host. 
 

 
 5. Finally, if it is required , send the thief a legal notice and follow it with a legal action.

Preventive actions against content theft from blogs, websites and other webspaces

i. Put a copyright notice on the blog/ website. 
 
 ii. Do not put your digital art or high-resolution photographs directly on the website/ blog. 
 
 iii. Instead of posting videos directly on the blog, put them on YouTube and give a link on the blog. 
 
 iv. Set up a Google alert on some of your high quality content, so that you are notified whenever your content is shared on the web, and then check whether it is theft. 
 
 v. Allow only short RSS feed so that automated curating/ aggregating sites too have only a small part of the blog post and not the whole.

More on ITB blog, linked below.

Originally published at www.indiantopblogs.com on August 11, 2016.