What you can do if your work has been copied in the Internet
What to do when your work has been copied in the Internet
The onset of Internet technology brings a lot of advantages. Life become easier for all of us. Information sharing and dissemination is very easy, you can almost do anything with the click of a finger so to speak. Communication is made easier too, you can let your fingers do the walking. The list is long actually, but there are disadvantages to it also, the Internet security and Internet plagiarism -- copying of other work are easily done as well. Just use the “copy and paste” mechanism and bingo you can copy other work immediately. Some pretenders even copy the name of the one who posted it. That is what happened to me. It is common sense to know that if it is not your work, don’t copy it, it should be as simple as that but of course people don’t bother with that as well.
I was just browsing the Internet the other week when I found out that three of my articles are posted in different websites. I was curious and I wanted to know what are the things I can do if these things happen. I will share to you what I have learned so far and what we can do if somebody stole our content without permission from us, the author.
What to do:
- If they didn’t ask your permission for an article to be posted to another site, this is clearly stealing others content. Even if you allow them to post it and they ask your permission you need to tell them to link it to your article or site. Decide if this will suffice for you, if not then ask them to remove your article soonest.
- You can buy a software which will detect if your work is plagiarized
- It is safe if you put “copyright” below your article . For example © Copyright 2009 ________________(your name) with all rights reserved, it will serve as a warning to those who will copy them. It may serve as precautions too so that they will think about it first before copying your content.
- There is what we call the THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1998, and you can find all relevant explanation to copyrights in the website US Copyright Office. This was signed in 1998 by then President Clinton to protect the rights of people to their works. You can read the site and your basic questions will be answered pertaining copyrights or infringement etc.
- If your work has been copied, you have the option to communicate with the person or the site which copied your work. Usually you can communicate with them through the webmaster at the bottom most part of the page site. If all else failed and after waiting for sometime you may want to take action and file the DMCA Online Form For Google
- Online DMCA Form for Blogger-- this form is very easy to accomplish, all you need is an email address (gmail account) and you are going to supply them with information where the article is copied and where it is posted, you need the specific URLs of course. Just be patient because it takes more than a month to get a response.
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In sending DMCA notifications to different search engines you may want to read this.
Related relevant sites which you can check:
- Yahoo.com Copyright
- Bing Webmaster Center Help
- DMCA-Google
I find this site very useful too. I hope this article helps you in a way.