Protecting Your Copyright

One major challenge for websites is copyright theft. It is very easy for unscrupulous people to steal your content for their own gain. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to track your content.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that you own the copyright as soon as you write your original content. You do not HAVE to register it with the copyright office, although this can be a very good idea. Registering your copyright gives you more rights if you have to sue over misuse of your content.

Next, remember that if you do find a case of copyright infringement, you probably do not need a lawyer to handle the matter in its initial stages. Most webmasters, no matter how unscrupulous, would rather not deal with a lawsuit and will remove your content upon request. Send them an email telling them that you want the content removed or proper credit given with a link to your site, depending on your preferences.

If you meet with any reluctance to comply, or do not hear back within a couple of days, send another email making it clear that you will contact their webhost and ask that their site be taken down.

Of course, not everyone will comply. Some will be in other countries, and have little to fear from you legally. However, if their hosting is subject to the DMCA or similar legislation, they will honor a request to take the site down, as otherwise they may be held liable as well. You can also complain to Google and other search engines, asking that the content be removed from the index. If no one can find the content then there is no benefit to it being on the other website.

If all else fails, it may be time to consider going to a lawyer and finding out if you have more options available to you.

Now, you may be asking how to find out if someone is using your content. With tools such as Copyscape and Google Alerts, this is really not too difficult.

You can go to Copyscape at any time, type in an URL and see if anyone is using your content. With the current popularity of automatically generated pages, you will probably see a lot of junk pages using a small part of your content, which is annoying, but rarely of serious concern, as they probably link to your site already.

Google Alerts can be quite useful, not only for copyright tracking purposes, but also for any articles you have written for free distribution. Create an alert by going to News Alerts on the Google News page, taking a quote directly from your content. This should be long enough to likely be more or less unique, but not too long. Set the alert to search the web for this quote and how often you would like results sent back to you. This works just like any other search on Google.

Please note this is not to be taken as legal advice. These are simply tips on the basic steps you can take. Consult a lawyer if you need legal advice.

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