Detecting Copyright Infringement on the Internet

Have you ever wondered whether anyone else is using your website material for their own purposes? Or whether you web writer(s) have used any verbiage from someone else's web page? There are now an estimated 172 million websites, with the numbers increasing rapidly. With all of the information available on the Internet and the hundreds of millions of web pages available for public viewing, finding violations of copyright and enforcing them may be difficult.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which was signed by President Clinton, provides for criminal penalties for willful copyright violations committed "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." Penalties for a first-time offense can include a fine up to $5,000 and a prison sentence of up to five years. Subsequent offenses may be punished with fines of up to $1 million and a prison sentence of up to 10 years. The Act exempts nonprofit libraries, archives and educational institutions from criminal liability.

From time to time, I have found plagiarism on the Internet and I'm sure that there are many undiscovered examples. Last year, I decided to compare the website content that I developed for a previous employer to other web pages. I was surprised when I found that a page on another company's website was exactly the same as mine with one exception. I mentioned the name of my employer, and the other company substituted the word, "we" for a company name.

You, too, can find out whether your web content has been copied. Just go the www.copyscape.com and enter the url of any web page that you want to compare. This is the free version and it will return a limited number of similar pages but includes those that are most similar or even identical. If you would like the search to include all results, you can obtain a premium membership to the site. A premium membership also allows you to search the web for unauthorized use of our offline materials through a copy-and-paste search function.

If you do find another web page that is suspiciously like yours, the date of publication on the web becomes important. You can find out approximately when pages were uploaded or changed at the Internet Wayback Machine at www.archive.org/index.php. After you enter the url of the page(s) involved, you will be given the dates that changes were made to that page.

As you can see, it's easy to use material from one page on another, but it's also easy to get caught.