Is your online content being stolen? Why should you care about online plagiarism?

There are many reasons. The first and most important is that your content is a product of your hard work and creativity. Nobody should be able to take it from you, without your permission, and make money from it. If anybody should make money from it, it should be you!

Your content is a part of you, and is part of your online legacy. You do not want someone plagiarizing it and using it in ways that are inappropriate, or counter to your beliefs.

So how do you stop online plagiarism of your content?

Detect online plagiarism.

The simplest way to detect online plagiarism is by using Google Search. Select some unique, key phrases from your article and put it into Google Search. If someone has copied your content, it will appear on Google's search results.

Make sure to use phrases that are unique and do not use phrases that are too long. Once you have spotted likely candidates, go to the article and make sure that it is actually plagiarized or copied content.

If you notice any significant drop in traffic on any of your online articles, then it may have been plagiarized and copied. Make sure to do a Google Search on those articles.

Online plagiarizers may use software that can alter the order of words, replace certain words with synonyms, alter the position of sentences and paragraphs, and other content copying strategies to avoid detection.

Many online plagiarizers will also copy little sections of content from multiple sources so it is more difficult to detect plagiarism and track their article back to its origins.

If you write for HubPages or other online writing sites, they will likely have their own duplicate content detector. In fact, HubPages frequently sweeps their articles for duplicate content and they will alert you when they find any. However, if you are found to be plagiarizing or copying content, you will get a Hub Score penalty.

There are also free and commercial plagiarism detector software. Some of them charge a flat fee, some are subscription based, and others charge a small fee per article scan.

Also check out RychardeManne's very excellent article on how to detect plagiarism. He talks about using Google Alerts and text watermarking to track your own content. However, I have not been able to find any ready-made text watermarking tools. The technology still seems to be in the research stage and it is unclear to me how you can prevent an automatic tool from just stripping out Unicode text watermarks.

However, if your images or videos are getting stolen, then there are well established procedures to add a digital watermark to your image content. Make sure that your digital watermark is at a location in the image (over the main image content rather than in the background) that it is difficult to remove. The advantage of using a visible digital watermark is that you get free advertising from the people who steal your images. The disadvantage of using a visible digital watermark is that it may degrade the visual appeal of your images.

Identify who is responsible for the plagiarized content.

If the plagiarized content is hosted by a reputable third party such as HubPages, Associated Content, eZine, or other online writing sites, then you may report the plagiarized content to the hosting site. Many of these sites will have a way for you to flag the article, and report it as stolen. Make sure to provide as much detail as possible in your report.

However, plagiarized or copied content will frequently appear on a website that does not have an author name or a contact person associated with it. To find out who is responsible for the website that is hosting your plagiarized content, use the whois service.

The whois service allows you to query a database to determine the owner of a website or IP address. There are many online sites that will allow you to perform whois queries for free. Another very useful whois site is uTrace - which will show you where a domain or IP address is located geographically, as well as give you whois information.

By running a whois query on the offending website you will be able to tell who is registered with the website, or at least who their web hosting service is. You may then get in touch with the site administrators and ask them to remove the plagiarized content.

Report the plagiarized content.

Once you have identified whom to contact about your plagiarized content, you have several options available -

1. Just flag the content using whatever tools are available at the hosting website. Make sure to include as much detail in your report as you can including proof of ownership.
2. Write a personal e-mail to the site administrators asking them - nicely - to remove the plagiarized content and to take action against the plagiarizer.
3. Call up the site administrators and ask them - nicely - to remove the plagiarized content and to sanction the plagiarizer. You may want to first write out what you plan to say.
4. File a DMCA report with the hosting website.

5. File a DMCA report with Google AdSense. If the plagiarized article is showing AdSense advertisements, you can also file a DMCA report with AdSense. This is a very powerful option because it will likely get the offender banned from Google AdSense so that he will be cut off from that stream of revenue not only for your article, but also for all his other plagiarized content. If he is not using AdSense, you can probably also file a DMCA report with whichever advertising service he may be using.

While reporting plagiarized content, it is important to be professional at all times and to keep copies of your correspondence. Do not lose your temper and get personal with the people that you are interacting with. If you are making a call, you may want to tape the call.

A common response by many online writers is to publicize the plagiarizer's online identity in an online forum or message board. This is generally not a good strategy because it exposes you to retaliation. In addition, the plagiarizer can easily shed his old online identity and just put on a new one.

With his new identity, he may decide to stalk you or harass you online as retaliation to your actions.

For this reason, if you are planning to file a DMCA report with Google AdSense anyway, you may want to forego contacting the site administrators especially if it seems like the site administrators and the plagiarizers are one and the same.

For your own privacy, it is best to remain anonymous and only make reports through official channels and trusted third parties.

Always get permission for all third party content that you are using, so that you do not make yourself vulnerable to retaliation reports. Carefully read and follow all the guidelines of the online writing and affiliate advertising sites that you use.

As of now, plagiarism is not a criminal act.

Most lawsuits against plagiarism are frequently copyright infringement lawsuits which do not directly deal with the act of plagiarim, i.e. falsely getting credit for a piece of work or idea that is not yours.

Copyright infringement lawsuits deal with the use, sale, and distribution of copyrighted content without permission from the owner.

According to the United States Copyright Office, content is automatically protected under copyright laws as soon as it is "created and fixed in a tangible form". Registration is only necessary if you choose to file a lawsuit.

Most publishers will choose not to file a lawsuit because there is a large time, financial, and emotional cost involved. Most publishers may not even pursue reporting a plagiarizer because even the smaller time and emotional cost here may not be worth the rewards.

It is exactly this - the high cost of reporting and proof of ownership - that plagiarizers are counting on to continue their criminal activity.