eAction

Dr. Ken Evoy has written an excellent, in-depth article on this topic in his ezine, The EDGE # 083. I’d like to highlight just a few of these suggestions as I think we all need to be reminded of them from time to time. I’ll do this in my own words, however.

There is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act which protects the material that you produce for your web site. Although you or I might not stoop to copying from others’ sites, there are immoral people who have no qualms about this. The better your Intellectual Property is, the more likely it is that someone will copy-paste your text and even your graphics on their website. To a certain degree this is a very back-handed compliment to you.

On the other hand, it is wrong, and can cause some problems so you need to know how to proceed when you get to the “Now I must take Action” point. If the violation is vague you might be stuck, but you can take steps to ensure that each situation is more black and white, and that you have documentation to prove your ownership of your own materials.

1. Start a Documentation file. Put in it;
a record of your site ownership, and what shows up at WhoIs for your domain
proof of payment for your domain and hosting
backup your site and put it on a CD - file that CD
do that backup and filing of the CD again every 3-6 months.

2. At the bottom of every web page, put a copyright notice like this; (c) 2001-2007 Ruth Marlene Friesen - All Rights Reserved (If you put it in an includes file you can update it by making one change to the includes file and every page will be updated at once when you upload it).

Confronting Culprits

It is a good idea to do regularly searches on your keywords to see how you rank in the search engines. That is usually when you will discover some other site that is suspiciously like yours. Check it out, and if you are ready to confront the culprit, prepare a polite but firm email to the offending party, explaining who you are, and your site, and that they have taken your material without your permission. Ask them to take it down.

If those pages do not disappear fairly swiftly, you write another polite but firm email to their ISP or hosting provider. State that you have documentation to prove you are the rightful owner of that intellectual property, and ask them to remove the offending site. If they ask to see your documentation send them copies of it. Generally though, they don’t want trouble and will remove the site that stole your material.

Google has a site where you can check to see if any other site is copying your material. http://www.copyscape.com/ But do remember that you may have quoted your own material when you listed your site on some directories. So don’t get all uptight until you are sure it is truly a theft.

Your next resort would be to complain to the search engines, but they advise to be sure it is true theft of your web pages and content, and not must a quote that may even be in your favour and drive traffic to your site.

It really pays to be cool and collected, and not go off in 40 directions when you discover this kind of thing. But if you have taken steps to protect your intellectual property, then if it does have to go to litigation to be resolved, at least you are sure of winning your case.

Perhaps this is not necessary, but let me add one more thing. Make sure that you don’t steal yourself. Sure as anything, the opposing side will try hard to find evidence that you’ve been guilty of the some plagiarism too.