Tips on Protecting Your Writing from Plagiarism

These days it seems that for every hard working, original, writer there are at least ten people happily willing to republish their work without asking permission or even giving credit. As more writers turn to making their work available online in e-zines, books, and more they are unwilling making themselves targets for unscrupulous "authors", "publishers" and more. I myself have found reviews, and comments from my blog's and other online venues reproduced on other sites without so much as a nod of thanks in my direction.

It is important that all writers and publishers online take steps to protect their content from those that would happily use your hard work for their personal gain. An initially step to take may seem simple but isn't always taken by online content producers and that is to copyright all written material. This can be done by submitting your documents online through the U.S. Copyright office for $45 per submission. For those who have gone through the copyright process before the price per submission was raised on July 1st of 2006.

Once you have registered your copyright with the US Copyright office you can take steps to making surfers aware that your content is protected. In addition to adding copyright notices to the content found on your personal sites also include a notice on your blog. Adding this notice might not deter some thieves but it could create a sticky situation for those who are steeling blog feeds and passing them off as their own content. Their subscribers might start to wonder why a copyright credit is being given to an unknown party and, with any luck, will lead them to the original source of the feed.

After you are sure that your rights have been documented you can begin checking for those guilty of plagiarism online. A great new site that I love is Copyscape which allows you to simply put in your domain name and it will search for sites that copy your text in anyway for free. Another site that is popular among professors and colleges in general is Plagiarism.org which, for a fee, will let you upload text/manuscripts and within 5 days they will email you results.

So now that you know how to find plagiarists what do you do once you catch someone? I've known some writers that will discuss it in online communities for weeks before taking any actual action. While I do understand the need to vent I prefer to take action and then vent about the situation.

The first thing to do is to contact the guilty (seeming) party via email and give them the chance to remove the offending content. In a few cases I have known the site owner to be innocent as they had actually purchased copyright material from a third party who was knowingly profiting from stolen content. For those who are well aware of what they are doing the knowledge that the real author is also aware of what is going on is enough to scare them into removing the copyrighted material.

In some cases a simple email isn't enough to get the plagiarists attention. If you do contact someone, politely but firmly, via email and nothing happens the next thing to do is to check the WhoIs database for additional contact information. With any luck you will be able to obtain a physical mailing address and sending a certified letter, with your lawyers contact information if you have one, will get the information removed.

If after doing all of this your work remains firmly planted on the offending site you should take your case directly to the hosting or ISP Company. I recommend calling the ISP or hosting company directly and letting them know of the situation. In most cases they will want you to either email or fax proof of your copyright, the address of your site if the information came from your site, and a printed version of the offending party's site. Most ISPs or hosting companies will review the information and take down the entire site within 24 hours if not much sooner until the offender can come up with disputing information or, as in most cases, fade away never to be seen again.

I hope this information will help you be more aware of how/where your copyrighted content is being used. It is important that all content providers take the time to stay aware of their rights and see that they are enforced. Do not let anyone profit off of your hard earned work with your permission because, in the long run, plagiarism hurts our industry as a whole.