Report Plagiarism: How to Take Action When Your Work is Stolen
Report Plagiarism: How to Take Action When Your Work is Stolen
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Home Page > Law > Copyright > Report Plagiarism: How to Take Action When Your Work is Stolen
Report Plagiarism: How to Take Action When Your Work is Stolen
Posted: Jan 14, 2011 |Comments: 0
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You must report plagiarism in order to stop it. Every day thousands of documents, written works and ideas are infringed upon to the detriment and financial loss of the owner. Plagiarism and its close cousin copyright infringement are valid laws with serious consequences in the United States, Europe, Australia and other parts of the world. When someone plagiarizes your work and you are successful in pursuing a lawsuit against them, they can be heavily fined, sentenced to substantial prison terms, and be required to surrender their businesses and domains. Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement consequences are often served swiftly and stiffly. However, few people who publish content on the web are aware of the high likelihood that their work will be stolen. Perhaps more importantly, most content owners wouldn’t know how to report plagiarism even if they recognized it. The following is a guide for action when work owned exclusively by you has been plagiarized.
How to Report Plagiarism
When your work has been plagiarized you must take action immediately. The longer you wait, the more money you will lose, the more complications you will encounter with search engines related to duplicate content, and the more time the plagiarizer has to benefit from your content. Additionally, the process to report plagiarism should come in small steps, which means that excessive time between any one step will only allow a plagiarizer to mask or hide their activities. Act swiftly, firmly, and if you state that you are going to take any specific actions, you must take them. Idle threats will ultimately only give thieves more confidence to commit plagiarism and copyright infringement. You should report plagiarism in the following manner:
1.) Document your findings. When you have been plagiarized it is critical to document any evidence that you collect. Screen shots and URL’s from offending websites should be saved and placed in a secured folder. Offending websites should be investigated to determine if there are other forms of your works being plagiarized on the site. For cases where plagiarism or copyright infringement is evident, you should perform an analysis of the extent of the offenses. Consider the following:
Are any of your original resource links or body links retained? Do they appear to be retained, but actually point to another URL?
Is your name still showing as the author, but without a link of any kind?
Has the title been changed?
Has the work been altered or edited? Is it still credited to you if it has been edited or changed?
These are important considerations, because some cases of plagiarism are in fact only cases of poor understanding of republishing rules. If based upon the evidence you collect it’s questionable that the offender isn’t purposefully plagiarizing your work, but rather doesn’t have good posting habits or fails to understand republishing guidelines then you should pursue the case accordingly.
2.) Contact the offending website. Using the contact form, a comment box, forum, or information that you obtain from WhoIs.com, the offending website should be provided with a notice that they are featuring plagiarized content that you own, including a URL to the link where your work originally appeared and the URL on the offending site where the plagiarized version can be found. Keep in mind that many websites have formats where users post content and the site can’t know whether it’s plagiarized or not. If you contact a website to have work removed or cited/credited correctly, give them the benefit of the doubt and use polite language and simply ask them to remove the content.
Most websites will act immediately when you inform them of plagiarism offenses. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, websites are sheltered from liability of content posted by their users provided they act in good faith when they receive a plagiarism report. To your advantage, this same federal act provides severe consequences for plagiarizers and copyright infringers.
For websites that are blatantly plagiarizing your work, a more direct approach is usually necessary. Copying passages from the DMCA or other copyright laws to include with your email requesting removal is often quite effective. You should firmly state that you expect your work to be taken down within 48 hours. Then, monitor the site. If your work is still up two days later, it’s time to move on to the next step in reporting plagiarism.
3.) When contacting the offending website yields no results in your efforts to report plagiarism, the next step is to contact administrators of the domain. Simply enter the domain into the WhoIs.com search feature and record all information returned. Often you will be able to obtain the names of owners, administrators and technicians for a website. Most domain searches will yield a physical address and one or more telephone numbers. Use this information to make contact with every person related to your case. Your communications should always be similar: point to the URL of the original posting of your work, the URL of the offending work, and firmly request that the plagiarized version be removed at once. Additionally, you should ask that you be contacted to acknowledge your request and to affirm that action has been or will be taken within 3-5 business days. You may send this communication via email to the above parties, via certified express mail, fax, or by telephone. Be sure to document all of your efforts.
4.) In your efforts to report plagiarism, it can’t be overstated that you should always follow through with the actions you threaten to take. In fact, your communications should never be written like threats at all- they should be written more like a prediction or informative account of the steps you are prepared to take in order to prevent and stop plagiarism of your content. Therefore, if step three does not resolve the issue within 7 days, it’s time to escalate the case.
With the help of an attorney or an online legal assistance firm, you should create a Cease and Desist letter. This letter is a formal method of demanding that the plagiarism of your work be immediately discontinued upon pain of serious action on your part. In your cease and desist communication, you should mention the next steps you will take (see below), which often achieve results when other attempts fail. Mail this formal request to the address listed on the domain registry and on any addresses provided by the offending website. Allow 10 days for action.
5.) The next step to report plagiarism and all steps that follow are quite serious and can result in severe consequences for the offending party. By now it’s quite likely that the plagiarizer has no intention of correcting the situation and so must be treated accordingly. Gathering all of the evidence you have collected thus far, it’s time to approach the search engines.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing take plagiarism cases very seriously and act decisively when cases are appropriately presented to them. The punishment for offenders? Banning of the offending domain from the search engines. This will effectively end the life of that particular online business. While this process is somewhat complex and takes time to enact, it does serve to cripple the efforts of the individual or business to plagiarize content that you own. You will need to make contact with each search engine and follow their specific instructions for reporting plagiarism. Please consider reading an associate article to be released shortly that will discuss specific steps on how to report plagiarism to the search engines.
6.) Like the search engines, most credible hosting companies have a vested interest in keeping the content that is hosted on their servers legal and free from copyright infringement or plagiarism. WhoIs.com and other web resources can provide information that will tell you which hosting service an offending site is using. By contacting the hosting company and alerting them to the plagiarism offenses, the hosting company can simply remove the offending content and/or discontinue hosting the offending website.
7.) If you are unsuccessful in your efforts to report plagiarism using the above methods, the only choice left is litigation. This should be avoided whenever possible because it is exceedingly time consuming and often costly. However, if you have conducted yourself professionally and collected evidence in a strategic manner, successful litigation almost always results in stiff penalties for the offenders, including punitive damages and surrender of the domain in question.
Ultimately, if content owners don’t report plagiarism, there will not be a significant enough threat to deter thieves from committing these offenses. Plagiarism serves to undermine the quality of your work, destroys its publishing exclusivity, causes loss of website traffic due to issues with duplicate content and linking, and causes significant loss of intellectual property income. These are all serious offenses and are treated accordingly in a court of law. But just because these laws and the consequences of breaking them are in place doesn’t mean that we don’t have to be vigilant and aggressively pursue cases of plagiarism against us. If we as writers, authors, content developers and business owners report plagiarism when we encounter it, we will be sending a firm message that will help to protect the integrity of our intellectual property. Additionally, our collective actions can be used to pressure search engines and the FCC to take more decisive steps against plagiarism and copyright infringement.
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About the Author:
If your work has been plagiarized and you need to report it, please click here:
http://www.reportplagiarismnow.com/
If you have collected evidence and are ready to make an immediate plagiarism report, please do so here:
http://www.reportplagiarismnow.com/report-plagiarism/
Report Plagiarism Now is a free website that is dedicated to preventing, detecting, and reporting plagiarism. By joining our site and posting plagiarism offenses against you, you will be helping to stop plagiarism and copyright infringement and to build influence to put pressure on search engines, hosting services, and the FCC to take a stronger stance on plagiarism. Please take a firm stance of your own and visit us at one of the above addresses.
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