November 20, 2019
Steps to take if your content or blog has been copied
You are passionate about writing. You might be writing articles on your own website, or you are a blogger and enjoy sharing your thoughts on what you are passionate about. You might also be writing content for other websites.
Well, the first thing that you will do is to do a plagiarism check on your work. You want to make sure you have not accidentally copied any sentences from someone else’s writing. With billions of websites, you must be doubly sure that what you are writing and posting is plagiarism-free.
Once you have done a plagiarism check and your work is all 100 percent original, you upload it and sit back and relax. But what happens when you discover that someone else has stolen your work.
How do you go back and check if your content or blog has not been stolen? By running a plagiarism checker, of course. You upload your content on a plagiarism checker and run a check. If all or some parts of your work shows up as plagiarized, you can get the information about the site or sites on which your content exists.
Now you can either tear your hair out, curse, and swear or take action against the thief who has stolen your intellectual property.
No, the culprit did not seek your permission.
No robber ever seeks consent to steal your TV or any other worldly possessions of yours, so why should he bother to seek your permission for stealing your brainchild.
So, what do you do? Every country in the world does not have laws to punish plagiarizers. If you have written content for another website, get in touch with them and tell them that your content has been plagiarized. If it’s your own web or blog site, here are a few steps that you can take that might result in some action being taken against the culprit.
- First of all, be very professional in your correspondence throughout the process
- When you have discovered the websites on which your content or blog has been plagiarized and posted, note down the URL address and the date (if published). Take a screenshot of the URL, the title, and the content.
- Get in touch with the website owner. This information is easy to find on the internet.
- Send them full details of your content; provide the URL address, date published, and authorship. Send them your original content and the plagiarized content. You can take a snapshot of the plagiarism checker on which you discovered the plagiarism culprit.
- Ask them to take down the content by a specific date.
- Mark that date on your reminder calendar.
- Run periodical checks to see if they have complied with your request or not.
If they have complied and removed the plagiarized content, great! If not it’s time to escalate the issue.
Write to the website hosting company and send them all your concerns:
- Your original content
- Authorship
- Website on which it was uploaded, date
- The site on which your content has been plagiarized and date
- All your correspondence with the website owner
- Request the website hosting service to take down your content
If the website owner and the web hosting service provider does not take any action, write to the search engines and send them all the details of your correspondence with the website owner and hosting service provider.
After doing all this, there isn’t much you can do. Yes, if this offense has been committed in the US, you can take legal action. But in other countries, it’s just a long shot.
Use a Good Plagiarism Checker
You have worked hard in creating the content or blog, so don’t just upload and forget about it. If you do that, you open yourself to risk as someone may be stealing your content and using it. Your blog posts might go viral, and your blog site might be in trouble.
Make a plan to keep a check on the content or blog that you write. Use a good plagiarism checker and check your work periodically on it. PlagiarismDetector.net is a good plagiarism checker to use. If you discover your blogs, articles, or content are being plagiarized, take the steps that have been suggested to protect your intellectual property.
