Plagiarism: What to Do If Someone Steals Your Website Copy

You've worked hard or invested a lot of money to get high-quality content up on your site. And it's worked: you've seen a big jump in traffic. But not all of that traffic has brought good things. You're looking around a few competitors' sites one day, and you find that it's happened to you: somebody's swiped your content.

The Internet has historically been a much more casual medium than print. The standards are less well-established, and for a long time it was a free-for-all. But more people are starting to take online plagiarism seriously.

Online plagiarism can hurt your business. That's because Google doesn't like duplicate copy. If it finds identical copy on two different websites, it will often list just one. And the one it chooses may not be yours, even if the content was yours to begin with.

So what can you do if this happens? The situation can be tricky; the copy thief could be located in another country, difficult to threaten with legal action-or it could be next to impossible to get in touch. Luckily, there are a few things you can do. Here they are, in the generally recommended order:

Step 1: Send a letter to the website owner. First, be reasonable. While many plagiarists are chronic copyright abusers with malicious intent, some may not understand copyright rules or may have received the content from a third party. In these cases, the business owner may be willing to remove the plagiarized content without a fuss.

Send a mildly-worded letter to the business owner, saying that you have noticed your copy on their site. Explain that you are writing to ask that they remove it. Send the letter by email and by snail-mail if possible. Keep the email in your "sent" folder until the issue is resolved; you may need proof that you sent it if the situation escalates.

If you can't find the owner's contact info, try the following steps suggested by Copyscape.com:

• Send an email to Webmaster@theirdomain.com.

• Go to this website. Enter the offending domain. The name and physical address of the person the domain is registered under will appear at the bottom of the page.