What can you do to prevent your articles or blog posts from being stolen? And what should you do if someone has breached your copyright? You don't want someone else making money by stealing from you do you? Or worse you don't want to be prevented from making money from your own articles. That happened to me. Read my post Copyright - My Article has Been Stolen!
Visibly copyright your work
It's impossible to prevent plagiarism but you can help discourage it. Make sure you claim copyright on your blog, website or articles. That way no one can claim any doubt. If they know you are serious about copyright they are less likely to steal from you.
Register your work
There are some websites that offer a free registering service, usually in return for advertising space on your web page. But hey the advert works for you as a deterrent to wood be thieves anyway. Basically they are just acting as an independent third party who will confirm the date at which you registered your work with them. This enables you to prove you had your work from that date, so anyone unable to prove ownership of your work at an earlier date than that will lose their case. One such website is myfreecopyright.com
Check regularly for copyright breaches
Frequently checking the internet for stolen copies of your work will help you keep on top of it and nip it in the bud. A simple way is to copy and paste the first one or two sentences from your article into the google search box. This will bring up any versions of your article to the fore. This was in fact how I found my article on Go Articles - I had forgotten it was on there. Alternatively there are lots of sites out there that will check for you such as copyscape and copygator.
What should you do if you find an illegal copy of your work?
The first thing to do is to send a polite request to the website owner informing them that you are the original author and owner of copyright - with simple proof if you have it, for example a link to your works original siting. Request that they remove your article from their site, or if you prefer that they give you due credit on their site and add a link to your original work.
If this has no effect contact the websites host. Send a DMCA take down notice (US) or EUCD (Europe).
This basically means you need to include certain information in your communication.
1. Your (copyright owner) full name and contact details
2. Details of recipient (who you're writing to)
3. Title of and link to your original work
4. Title of and link to offending work
5. Brief statement including declaration of copyright and that you believe that the copied article breaches your copyright, why you believe this and request for the article to be removed.
6. Sign and date (on paper or electronically doesn't matter)
It's that easy. Hopefully this will resolve any issue you have.
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