2005/08/04 Plagiarism and copyright

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but outright theft is an entirely different matter. I'm pretty liberal about allowing people to use articles from this site; almost everything here is free to use if you include a link back to here and a proper copyright notice. Unfortunately, some people just don't seem to care, or want to obfuscate the source of their content.

For example, with the help of http://www.copyscape.com/, I recently found a site that used a number of my articles, but put their own copyright notice at the bottom, and only included an indirect link back to here: they listed me as the author, and clicking that link brought you to a page that had my site link. That's not acceptable: they can't say that my content is under their copyright, and I want the link in the page itself.

So what to do? Well, the first step is to write to them pointing out the problem and asking them to fix it. I did that on July 26th.

If they ignore you, the next step is to contact their ISP, explaining the problem, and asking that they contact the site requesting compliance or removal.

In this case, I didn't have to go to that extent. The webmaster fixed the problem immediately and sent me a nice note telling me what he had done. It was just a simple misunderstanding, and was corrected to my complete satisfaction.

When these simple attempts don't work, http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3036 explains that advertisers like Google will pay attention to your complaints, but apparently won't do much. Other people have reported the same frustration with Google in similar circumstances.

After that, well, it gets harder. http://www.problogger.net/archives/2004/12/21/what-to-do-when-someone-steals-your-blogs-content-blog-plagiarism/ shows some of the frustration you can have. When you are providing free content, it's hard to justify expensive legal action, and if the offender is in another country, it may be nearly impossible anyway.

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