Since the inception of blogging, bloggers all over the world have always been at the task of protecting their writings from the copy-pasters. Imagine yourself producing a unique high quality content and find a lazy noob picking it up from your blog and re-producing its replica without giving you its credit. You'll be furious, dismal and frustrated over this loathsome deed which is why I've come up with some simple steps which you can take against the copy cat to teach them a lesson and preventing them to thieve your work again.
It's the matter of just last week when one of my posts was plagiarized word to word by a well known tech blog and they didn't even have the decency to pass on a credit backlink to my post. I had come across fellow blogger pals who had faced this but this time it was me. I could have taken suggestions from them on how to tackle this detestable situation but decided to do it myself. But before I explain what steps I followed to get the copied article taken down, I'll suggest you to go over the following requirements to prevent from being plagiarized altogether. After all, prevention is better than cure.
- Backup your blog (on some occasions these miscreants turn out to be hackers too).
- Use a security plugin or measure as well for the above reason.
- Register your blog in a copyright protector. Copyscape is the most famous one but I prefer myfreecopyright.
- Keep a regular check on whether your work is being copied or not.
- Get familiarized with protocols like DMCA and cease and desist.
- Become an active member of a forum that discuses about plagiarism.
Now that you've protected your blog, you're on the safer side from being plagiarized but that doesn't mean your job is over. Thiefs always managed to find a way around to fulfill their desire to steal your work. What they don't know is that once the following real-steel steps are taken against them, they're gonna find themselves in a swamp full of troubles. I'll explain this giving my example. A post of mine was copied word to word by a fool who thought he could have gotten away with the heinous deed. Take a look at the cache version of the plagiarized post which had been removed at the time of writing this.
- I used the "Contact Us" form to politely ask them to remove the post ( didn't work ).
- I used the whois service to find out details about them.
- Grabbed their email ID and sent a personal message. ( didn't work ).
- Contacted their hosting provider to inform them about their customer's act (didn't work).
- Posted on their Facebook group to get their attention ( didn't work ).
- Registered a DMCA complaint to take the post (scared the shit outta them ).
DMCA which stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a service using which you can file a complaint against the plagiarism done against your work for which they first inform the criminals about their act of copyright infringement and criminalize them in SERP results or even higher if the notice is neglected. Within no time I got back a reply in email carrying an attitude with superiority complex instead of apologies to which I warned them that if they copy another work of my blog, I'll have a cease and desist letter delivered to their doorstep. 2 hours later I find the plagiarized post completely modified.
This was how I fought against plagiarism which yielded me favourable results. God forbidden but next time you're a victim of plagiarism, follow the above steps and you'll have the "dude" penalized. I hope this information proved to be useful for you.
