What to do About Website Plagiarism

With so much content being freely available on the Internet, there are increasing cases of website plagarism which basically means someone stealing content from your website.  If you find your website has been a subject of plagiarism it can be very frustrating, but there are a few things you can do to try and address the issue:

Contact the website owner

Firstly you should try to contact the website owner or webmaster concerned, you will need to be tactful but politely explain to them that they are in breech of copyright law and that  they must remove the duplicated content immediately. In most cases the site owner will remove the content and you need take no further action, you may even get an apology!  If you can’t find out any contact details on the site, you could try the following:

• Try some admin type email addresses like admin@domainofwebsite.co.uk, webmaster@domainofwebsite.co.uk, info@domainofwebsite.co.uk etc…
• Run a ‘Whois‘ check on the site concerned. This will give you more information about the site, such as the name of the registrant, an email address, who the site is registered through and who is now hosting the site.

Contact Advertisers on the Site

If the site has advertisers, then it’s likley the website owners are getting money from them.  If you can contact the site owners, let them know you will be contacting their advertisers if they don’t remove your content as quite often this will make them take notice as they won’t want to lose an income stream.  If you can’t contact the site owners, then go direct to the advertisers and explain the situation.  This may well cause them to pull out, as they wouldn’t want to be associated with someone who steals content from other websites.

Name and Shame

It is unfortunate, but if your content isn’t being removed from their website, then it’s time to name and shame them.  Don’t write a long post about the situation, just a short concise blog update naming the website in question might prompt them to take action, as the repercussions could affect their business.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

You can request for websites to be banned from Google and other Search Engines and also file a notice of infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with Google.  By submitting this infringement it could mean the site in question is banned from Google.  Find out what the protocol is with other search engines and file complaints to them too.

Legal Action

If all else fails you may need to take legal action, but consider the financial implications of this.  Contact a solicitor for further advice.

The post What to do About Website Plagiarism appeared first on .