Been Plagiarized? How to Spot and Fight Content Thieves

When your content is stolen by someone and posted to a website, it can be a nightmare. Besides the fact that it's illegal for people to do this, it can cause big problems with your search engine rankings, making it harder for people to find your writing in the first place. It's also immoral and just plain mean, making the original author feel violated.

Unfortunately, most of us have been there at least once. The Internet is home to millions of people of all sorts of character, and because it's easy to steal someone's writing, it happens often.

So, how do you find out that your writing has been stolen ... and how do you fight back? It's not as hard as you might think.

Finding Your Stolen Content

To begin, you'll need to download a copy of DupeFree Pro. It's free, and it's a pretty small program - just ignore the sales hype look of the page you hit. Then, take a second to install it.

Once you've installed it, open the program and pick an article that you'd like to check up on. To start, it's usually best to focus on the articles you've written that receive the most page views. These are the most likely targets, but as you get time, don't neglect the ones that receive fewer page views ... nothing is sacred to a thief.

Next, copy-paste your article into DupeFree Pro. You'll want to paste it into the blank white "window" on the left. Hit the "Online" button, and give the program a second to work. And what is it doing? It's picking several sentences from your article and performing a search in the top three search engines - Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

If it returns a hit, you're going to want to carefully review the link it's provided. The software has used a quotes search, pulling up only exact matches to what it's searched for. What this means is that if you've gotten a result, there is a web page out there using exactly the words in at least one of your sentences. Just click the number listed next to the sentence searched for, and you'll be taken to the search engine that it was found on. Then, you can go to the website that may be using your writing and check it out for yourself.

Do remember that the results you see today may not be the same as what you'll see tomorrow. Not only (hopefully) are you continuing to receive visits to your article, meaning that someone could steal your writing later, but a search can only look through what is in a search engine's index on any given day.

Fighting Content Thieves

The way you go about trying to get a content thief to remove the writing they've plagiarized off of you will depend on how you've published your work.

If you've published your work through a publisher - AssociatedContent, a traditional magazine or book publisher, etc. - your first step will be to contact the editor of that publication. Not only will they try to take care of the problem for you, but it's their place to do so. Whether you've published through them for free or for pay, they technically own rights to your writing and because they are a company instead of an individual, they have people backing them that know the legal stuff behind what you're fighting against.

If you've published your work yourself - on a personal website, a blog, a newsletter, etc. - you will first want to try contacting the person who has stolen your writing. Most of the time, websites will list a contact email address. Go ahead and use it, asking the person to remove the copyright infringing content within 24 hours and state that you will pursue further legal measures if it is not done.

When you run up against a thief who just can't let go of their ill-gotten goods, it's time to try contacting the provider of their website's space. To find out who is providing it, you will need to run a "whois" search on their domain name. Hit DNS Stuff and just type their URL in the "whois" box. This will provide you with contact information for the website owner, as well as the web hosting provider.

After going through all of this, if you're not getting anywhere it's time to take a step back and decide just how important this is to you. Try looking at the "Intellectual Property" links at FreeAdvice to see if you can find specific ways to legally pressure the thief to remove your content; depending on what your writing is about, you'll receive different answers.

It's never an easy topic, but it definitely pays off to take the time to find out if your writing is being stolen - and to fight back against the theft. Usually, content thieves know they've committed plagiarism and just think they won't get caught. When this is the case and they do get caught, all it usually takes is an email letting them know it for the illegal content to be removed.