How To Deal With Plagiarism

Plagiarism is to a writer what illegal file sharing is to a musician. If you are anything like me then you take a great deal of pride in what you write, if I don't think that my article is strong enough then I will press 'delete'. Everything that makes it to 'Publish Now' is something that I am proud of, and perhaps more importantly, it has taken me a lot of time. They say that time is money and they are right, if I could write and publish a high quality hub in 5 minutes then I would. One of my hubs took over 12 hours, spaced out over a few days, and I am still not 100% happy with it; but I wouldn't change pursuing a passion and a hobby for the world. I know that if you are reading this hub right now then there is at least a decent chance that you are a writer of some sort yourself, imagine that you found your most precious article copied word for word on somebodyelse's blog or website; or maybe altered very slightly.

This has happened to me, and if you look hard enough it has probably already happened to you. That article might have made you $1 on AdSense, or it might have made you $200, the point is that you have earned that money. You now have a cheater, a liar, a downright scumbag in fact, who has simply not only copied and pasted your article in 30 seconds but is also now competing with you directly for traffic and earnings. What are you going to do about it? it depends how bothered you are, but this hub will attempt to talk you through a). whether you should do anything and b). how to do it if you choose to.

Unfortunately somebody will plagiarise if they wish to plagiarise, but providing at least a slight deterrent may help you. Writers should place a copyright notice of some sort on every page of your work to make sure that idiots are 100% sure that they have no rights over the work. Unfortunately you cannot change an idiot, so this is not likely to actually prevent theft, however it may work in your favour if you need to dispute in the future. If you don't know how to get a copyright symbol using your keyboard, then just copy and paste this: ©. Another step that you can take is to use a Copyscape banner on your pages, I will be talking about Copyscape in more depth in a bit, but these banners can be found here.

Detecting Plagiarism

One of the most effective ways of finding plagiarism is by using search engines, simply copy and paste a random line from each of your articles into Yahoo and Google. It should be noted that this will only find articles that have been copied word for word, and not those where that sentence has been reworded ever so slightly. Alternatively, a more thorough way of finding plagiarism of your articles is to use a fantastic service by Copyscape for finding duplicates of your articles. Simply visit here for this great free service, which will use the URL of your article to find duplicates within just a few seconds. I'm sure that many of you would already have seen or heard about this site, or even use it regularly already, I would recommend that every serious writer bookmarks this site. An alternative would be to sign up to Copyscape's professional copysentry service, with which you can enter the URLs of all your articles and be informed if they are ever plagiarised, as soon as it happens. At $4.95 a month this service may be too expensive for many, but for those with thousands of articles and who are making a living out of writing, you probably cannot afford not to. I have a friend who's entire portfolio of 5,000+ blog articles was stripped and copied overnight by software, resulting in an instant 30% reduction in traffic; thankfully copysentry picked this up quick enough for him to get the content removed before it completely ruined him.

How do you prove it?

For online content, the only way to prove it is by using the 'Internet Archive'. Yes, believe it or not, the Internet has a fully search-able archive of every single article since 1996. That is an incredible 150 billion+ pages of information. I learnt this a few months ago, surely this should be bigger than Facebook? Click here for the amazing internet archive! This archive will tell you precisely what time and on what day an article first appeared on the net, it will also tell you precisely what time and on what day the idiot copy and pasted your article onto the net! hey presto, proof! I have never had an article not appear in hours and hours of messing about with this archive, so if your article is not reported as ever being on there, then you have no case whatsoever. You need this proof to beat the idiot!

This is of course completely up to you, you can make the decision as to whether or not you pursue the scumbag. But I personally believe that you should take into consideration a number of factors before taking action. Firstly, what exactly have you lost? If you have 500 articles on the web and the idiot has taken only one of those articles, and assuming that the article is not a big earner, then it may be counter productive to your earnings to pursue. The steps required can take time and effort, if the article in question only makes you 50 cents a month, a more productive use of your time may be to simply write through it. The two or three articles/hubs that you could write with your time might earn you $3 a week; that is $3 a week that you have lost because of the idiot. If on the other hand the idiot has taken your prime piece of online estate, competing with some of your most consistent and lucrative keywords, then you should without a doubt pursue. My only word of warning when pursuing the idiot is to remain polite and professional at all times, as much as you want to tell him what you really think of him, he knows where your articles are and a very small minority of the idiots might seek revenge. This could be dozens of counter productive comments on your blogs/hubs, or he could steal more of your articles, or he could even sabotage your AdSense account. Don't make the idiot too angry and never sink to his level, you will get your revenge the dignified and civilised way; and we all know that genuine writers are almost always very dignified and civilised people!

So, after thinking about it long and hard, you have decided to fight the idiot. Maybe I need to point out at this stage that the ideas and tips I will be giving you in this section are largely borrowed from Copyscape, I am certainly not plagiarising, just merely acknowledging how good a resource they are for writers. As for referencing, you can see the tips in their very own words here.

Step 1. The first thing that you should do is have a look around on the offending site for contact details, if you can find them then send a polite email asking for the content to be removed. You should note at this stage that the person you are emailing may not be the offender. Sometimes people outsource their writing in good faith. Wait a few days, if you do not get a response then try step 2.

Step 2.Find out who the site is registered to, as long as the domain is not a sub domain, you may be able to find out the name, telephone number and email address of the websites owner. There are many 'Whois' directories out there, try this one here. If you can find contact details, and yet they still do not respond by all possible methods, then unfortunately you will have to get a little nasty and move on to step 3.

Step 3.In that same 'whois' search, you will have been told which company is providing the web hosting for the site. Send them a polite email and inform them of the websites plagiarism, attaching a copy of your proof (which you should already have). Most hosting companies take this very seriously and will take action themselves for fear of liability.

Step 4. If your efforts have so far been unsuccessful then you need to send a formal 'Cease and Desist' letter to the offender informing them that they must remove the content from the site. This of course can only be done if you have found an address or email address of a site owner/employee. If you don't have these contact details, then send it to the web hosting company; they will soon remove the whole site if the owner does not respond to them! To find out how to write and send a Cease and Desist letter, there are many examples to be found on the web by clicking here.

Step 5.File a DMCA notice with all major search engines, at least MSN, Google and Yahoo. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and these search engines must bloke the offending site, or part of the site, from search engine indexes. To find out more about DMCA notices and how to send them, click here. You should attach/enclose a copy of your proof!

In the unlikely event that all five possible steps have failed to remove the offending content from the web, there is one more step that you could take. Please note that this is one that should only be used as a very last resort. That is to complain to affiliate and advertising networks that the site may use, e.g. Google AdSense. It is likely that the advertiser will close the website owners account. This step should only be used with a lot of prior thought and only as a last resort, remember that once somebody has been banned from AdSense they will never get another account. The owner of the website could be an innocent party, remember that sometimes websites can have lazy employees or outsource their work in good faith. Please make all attempts to get the offending content removed first. Imagine you were to use a 'royalty free' image which turned out to be copyrighted material, you would want the copyright holder to make every possible attempt to get the image removed instead of going behind your back and getting your AdSense/amazon/eBay account closed; the same principle could apply here. Always remember that a cheat will have many victims, the website owner could be a victim just like you.