What can you do about plagarism

[Barry O'Callaghan]

Since I'm going back into writing I realise plagarism is a big problem for both writers and websites. I just signed up with Copyscape to try to protect my work. I did a few checks on some old stuff I did for an old website of mine and several of my articles have appeared on more than one site . Since I don't have recourse to some expensive lawyer, is there anything I can do other than send these websites emails to take my articles off their sites?

Edit: sorry Mods, I think this is probably the wrong sub-forum for this, but I can't delete it.

[Chalkie]

You can simply report them to the hosting company, i think i have a copy of the form that you need.

Although, i would be tempted to ask them to remove it first, some people feel reporting direct to the hosts is a fair enough thing to do anyway.

[Planet Mark]

Hi Barry,

There was a multi-page discussion on this topic in the not too distant past, general consensus here was that it is important to pursue these thieves, first by asking the webmaster to take the stolen content down then following up with the host... there is an argument which says it it not worth worrying about - since the scraper sites are usually such low quality... can understand this point, but come down on the 'chase it up' side myself!

Was just thinking the other day about preventative blocking of country IP addresses... take India for example, where a lot of the 'DP types' come from, blocking India would not cost me anything much in revenue, but might well help stop my content being 'respun' for $2 articles and a ton of spam blog comments coming in... guess same goes for China and Phillipines.

Now, there are some smart reputable business people in all of the above countries for sure (at least one right here on PAL) - and of course would not stop anyone who was really determined in these countries.... but on balance this seems a sensible preventative measure given the reality of where many (though of course not all) web spammers / scammers are coming from these days.

Anyone done this or have any thoughts I'd be interested to hear.

Mark

[Tim]

Here's a tip for you. When you contact the website include something like:

"I appreciate this content may have been produced by a third party, and you were unaware that it was copyrighted."

This gives them an 'out'. 90% of the time they directly stole it, but by giving them an out, they'll be more open to replying and get the issue resolved (i.e. take the content off their site). You'll find they'll usually reply "yes, I hired someone who said it was their own work, etc, etc".

[Barry O'Callaghan]

Cheers guys, some good info here. I emailed two of these people and got a response from one of them, interesting enough Mark one of them claimed to have purchased them off an Indian marketing company. I'm not hugely bothered as these were old articles of mine and I was planning on re-jigging the site I had them on anyway, but going forward I obviously want to prevent this from happening as much as possible.