How to.... check if your site has been copied.

Plagiarism on the internet is a huge problem, and because the internet is world wide there are issues regarding enforcement of your rights. I guess the first thing is to identify if your site has been copied. One of the best ways to do this is use an online resource such as www.copyscape.com. Copyscape will not only tell you if a page has been copied, but it will also highlight the text that has been copied.

Having found that your content has been reproduced without your consent and without giving you credit to as the source, what can you do about it?

There is the International Convention for the Protection of Literary & Artistic Works (known as the Berne Convention) of which there are 169 countries that have signed up to the agreement. This agreement allows participating countries to implement proceedings in support of a copyright infringement.

Further, in 1998, President Bill Clinton passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The Act makes a provision under Title II, Online Copyright Infringement Liability that allows the originator or owner of Intellectual Property to bring an action against the Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosting the site and/or the any search engines displaying infringed work. So irrespective of whether the owners of the site are in one of the countries covered by the Berne Convention, because all the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN are US based bringing an action to register a grievance with the US Copyright Office can force the search engines to remove the site from their index. Under the act if they fail to do so the minimum amount damages that can be awarded following this is $150,000.00.

There is of course a third option, this being the internet there is also a third option, name and shame the offenders.

Case Study

In November last year we found 8 websites had plagiarised content directly from the XSEO website. Most of the offenders removed the copy from their sites. However despite several communications directly from our solicitors we find that two of the guilty parties have effectively ignored all requests to remove the text. Given that they are SEO's and the search engines are a big part of their business you'd have thought they would have wished not to risk being blocked by Google, MSN or Yahoo.

The two companies concerned are www.seo-web-solutions.com and www.downunderonline.com.au.

Proving plagiarism:

From the Copyscape service. Screen prints of the text they have recorded that exist on the offending web sites.

The highlighted text shows the location of text that has been taken from the original website, namely from XSEO. Of course you could then argue "but who was first to produce the copy?". Another tool available on the internet is Waybackmachine.

Our page was first recorded 6th Oct 2003.

Seo-web-solutions.com has no recorded entry in web.archive.org. This indicates the site isn't being read by Google, not good for SEO's. In fact this bunch has even left the text - "The XSEO approach..." in the copy, so they obviously didn't read it before they plagiarised it.

Downunderonline.com.au was first recorded 19th Aug 06

Having proved the originator of the copy, and the copy that has been duplicated without consent it is difficult for either of these organisations to argue a defense.

In this case it would appear complaining to them directly about their breach of copyright is not enough. Using the evidence gathered the next stage is to appeal to the search engines to exclude them from the index via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

As this is a case study we will post how this progresses. For the other sites that have recently been identified as also having stolen content from XSEO, if you do not want to become a case study - our advice, take our content down NOW!

Comment:

M.P

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