Report Plagiarism: How to Take Action When Your Work is Stolen

Report Plagiarism: How to Take Action When Your Work is Stolen:

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.

Report Plagiarism: How to Take Action When Your Work is Stolen

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. Screenshots and URLs from offending websites should be saved and placed in a secured folder, as said by Casinoslots. 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.