What To Do When Your Content Gets Copied?
A friend recently found out that something he had written a few years ago had been copied by someone. The person refused to remove it even after he contacted them. This is hardly the first time I’ve heard of such an incident, and it is quite common for anyone who is active online.
Being copied is frustrating, especially when you are not even being credited for it. While professional writers are penalized for such activities, someone who is blogging casually will not generally think twice about copy pasting something verbatim, since there are little consequences.
Being plagiarized is like giving away your work without even a token of appreciation. The ubiquity of web and the lack of time and awareness often lead to contents being freely copied. More often than not, creators are not even aware that their work is being stolen. I say stolen, because this is exactly what they are doing. You worked to make something, and someone else profits from it.
The internet is a content driven platform, and it is quite natural that good content will be copied. This can be a blog post, a photograph that you clicked, or even an infographic. Anyone who creates content frequently has almost certainly experienced this. Most people will just sigh and move on, but if you are not willing to let this slide, there are a few things that you can do.
Find out whether your work is being stolen
Most people are not even aware when their work gets stolen. People do not have the time to check regularly, and frankly, the internet is too vast a place for you to keep track of everything. Depending on the kind of content, there are some service you can use to find if they are being copied without your permission.
For images: Stolen images are usually easy to discover with the right tools. Google has a powerful image search service of its own, which you can use. When you visit this link, you will see a Camera icon, which you can click to upload your image and search for copies on the internet. TinEye is a similarly powerful, and free service. You can use either, or both of them to find whether someone has been sneakily using your photographs, or graphic content.
For text: Blog posts and articles take hours to write at times, especially if you like to research a topic well before you start, or are a stickler about thorough editing. Copying them however, takes a few minutes at the most. In fact, there are many scraping and publish services that can copy your content within seconds, and do not even require the copier to lift a finger.
If you can afford it, Copyscape is a great paid tool. However, I like to do things for free whenever possible, and if so do you, then you can use a mixture of free tools to get a pretty good detection system in place. Google Alerts are free, and you can just set it up once for every time you post, and the tool will alert you whenever someone copies you. You can also paste your post to a service like SmallSEOTools, or Duplichecker to see if someone has stolen the entire post, or even parts of it.
If you do decide to opt for the free route, I recommend setting up Google Alerts, as it only takes a few minutes for each time you post a blog, but will continue to work for years (or until Google kills the service). With other services, you will have to perform a check on a weekly or monthly basis, and if you have more than a dozen posts, it will take you way too long. AngEngland has a great tutorial on how to use Google Alerts, which will help you with this process.
So your content is being copied! Now what?
So you run the tests, and get the results back. Good news, or rather, the bad news is that you are indeed being plagiarized! Take a moment to feel good that someone feels your work is good enough to steal. Do not get too happy though, for many such thieves use automatic scraping tools which copy indiscriminately.
So now what can you do about this? That depends on the website where the copied stuff exists. If it is on a social networking site like Facebook (as a status update, or a note) there is little you can do. Facebook may have strict privacy policies, but I have been unable to find a way to report copied content. Twitter at least has the option to report copied content, but they take way too long, and are lax about the process, which is a major reason why so many quotes accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and practically no original content exist.
If on the other hand, the thief has a personal blog, or a self hosted website, you can have the content deleted, and at times the user removed as well.
Before you start the process for getting someone’s blog or website deleted, please do contact them first and inform them about your intentions. Most people will be surprised to know that copying someone else’s work is illegal, and can have serious consequences. Most people either do not know, do not care, or think that no one can do anything about it. Reach out to them through an email, their social media accounts, or even through the comment system on their blog. Inform them that the content is yours, and that you intend to take legal actions if they do not remove it. Set a deadline no greater that 3–4 weeks, and then wait for them to respond to your message.
What if they refuse to delete, or do not respond at all?
For blogging tools like WordPress, and Google’s Blogger, all you need to do is file a copyright violation complaint, and provide them with the link to your original content. ShoutMeLoud has done a pretty good work on creating a solid resource to tackle such plagiarism issues.
Many people buy a domain name and maintain their own website, but this does not mean that they can get away with plagiarism. Use a whois service to find out who is hosting their website, and directly submit a DMCA notice to them. Find out who the host of the website is by checking it at WhoIsHostingThis. The service also has a DMCA Notice Generator which you can use to quickly create a standard DMCA take down notice. Here are the direct links to the DMCA pages for some popular web hosting services:
- Hostgator: http://www.hostgator.com/dmca
- GoDaddy: No direct link, but you can email them at CopyrightClaims@godaddy.com
- BlueHost: https://www.bluehost.com/copyright-claims-policy
- DreamHost: https://www.dreamhost.com/legal/dmca/
If you are willing to spend some money, DMCA.com can take care of the take-down process for you for a sum of $99.
Google also has a much broader DMCA service, which spans all its services, including YouTube, and even the Android Play Store, and covers its search results as well. If someone has copied your work, and is ranking higher than you on Google for it, reporting it to Google will help you get the content removed, and repeat violators of copyright may even get their website unlisted. Plus, if the website makes money from stolen work using Google Adwords, the service will be disabled, and the thief will not be able to sign up for the service again.
How to prevent people from copying your work?
So you’ve submitted the DMCA notice, or alerted the blogging service about the copyrighted content, and the offending content has been removed. How to make sure this does not happen again? ProBlogger has en excellent 3 step guide to helping you out .
I hope this helps you in some small way. If I missed a service, or you know a better way to deal with this issue, do let me know in the comments.
Since this article is about stopping plagiarism, and it would be a little ironic if it got copied, you have my permission to reproduce this post on any kind of website you want, free or paid, as long as you link back to this original post. The permalink is http://psilosophy.in/what-to-do-when-your-content-gets-copied/ Please do not delete it when using this post.
Featured image courtesy: 10ch
