Online Copyright Theft & Combatting It More Effectively
Yesterday, having posted an article to MacSurfer last weekend, I came across an opinion snippet on a web site. The web site was in fact, injoydesign.com, a site that purportedly puts “joy into design”, the problem was, it wasn’t giving me much joy, the reason being that the snippet of the site I was looking at, was in fact text ripped directly from one of my articles: “Automatically Save Files in OSX with SaveCircle“
. So, you ask yourself: “What was I going to do about it?”
I Would Normally Let It Fly …
Now ordinarily I wouldn’t as much as bat an eye lid, in fact, I would go so far as to laud individuals who decide they are moved enough to actually write a rebuttal of their own, providing credit and a direct web link to the originating piece, but this guy was apparently having none of that. He just stole everything, text and pictures, and passed them off as his own - see image right.
That’s why, rather than to take it laying down, I have decided to write an article, an article showing up Greg Passuntino and InjoyDesign as plagiarisers, and to use this experience to help inform people of ways in which to detect plagiarism, and how to go about rectifying the issue sensibly, or not, as the case may be.
Copyright Theft and Finding the Culprits
You might think that finding the perpetrators of copyright theft was a job solely the domain of web sleuths, but in reality, with an eagle eye, and the knowledge of where to look, you can easily find them.
The Web Logs
For starters your web site traffic logs are a treasure trove of information about who has visited your site and when, and what files they have looked at. Things to look out for are as follows:
Linked Pictures - A single request per host for an individual picture, with the offending site as the referrer for the web hit.
Web Links - A web site, despite ripping content, may still send traffic your way, it’s worth looking at any referring sites. Using web stats software such as Google Analytics definitely helps with such a task.
The Search Engines
Search - Search engines are your friend, and can be used to great effect. I will never forget how shocked a friend of mine became when I was able to show him that I could easily tell him what web page he had lifted text verbatim from. If you have pilfered, the search engines won’t lie, and the original author can find it. Copyscape is such a search engine aimed at defending against plagiarism though I cannot vouch for its effectiveness.
Google Alerts - email alerts to search results are the perfect, and less stressful way to find identical content. Simply set up the alerts and Google will trawl the internet, identify matches and email you with the offending text and web address.
Dealing with Offending Material
Common Sense Approach with SEO benefit
The common sense approach is to make contact with the individual or company and to ask them to simply remove, amend or recompense you for the content they have stolen. In the past, when I have found bloggers or academic institutions with lifted material, I have simply asked them to credit the source and provide a link for readers to follow. This is probably the path of least resistance and also generates valuable non-reciprocal links which is great from a search engine optimisation point of view.
Unable to Make Contact with the Copyright Thief
If the site has no contact form and there are no obvious contact details then think about using the whois database for domains to find out contact details for the registrant or admin contact for the domain. Beyond this you next port of call is to the hosting provider and the network operation center where the site is hosted, again soemthing that can be found from using whois lookups.
The Image Switch Trick
If the site is leaching content, depending on the scale of the problem, you may wish to simply switch out the image content on your site, by copying and renaming the files, and referencing them accordingly in your original html, and then updating the original image files so that they show up on the offenders site as “something else”. A more wide ranging option would be to employ a 301 redirect, using mod_rewriteand .htaccess, to switch out all images to a duff equivalent based on the web traffic’s refferer address.
Learn Some SEO Tips and Write An Article
You could easily just take the whole thing in your stride and enjoy the process of learning some SEO skills, and use the opportunity to write an article about the whole saga making sure you include the author and site’s name as many times as possible.
Places to be sure to include these items include: the content, the page title, the file name, the meta description, meta keywords and elsewhere. And so, ultimately, once in each search engine’s index, people searching for the offending name can see a nice result set including the words “Copyright Theft” beside the author or site’s name, in my case “Greg Passuntino” or “InjoyDesign”.
Cease and Desist - The Legal Route
As a last resort, when there is wholesale copying, design plagiarism and breach of intellectual property taking place, and initial attempts to make contact have been futile, then, as a last measure, you can always follow legal channels. I would find a firm that deals in IP and internet law, rather than just any firm,. In the past I have used Charles Russell in London and can highly recommend them.
Conclusion: Would You Hire a Coyright Pirate?
Matt Mason has been touting the idea of competing with pirates in his book, The Pirates Dilemma, but in my case, this is hardly wholesale incursion on one’s buusiness and can easily be dealt with on a case by case basis, often simply. The reality is that fewer and fewer people have any morals, or academic standards of honesty, when it comes to taking material, and when online the act of theft is more anonymous and thus the consequences apparently less.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not anal about copyright, in fact I am pretty easy going, but as I said before, credit where credit is due. If individuals who steal content knew it would impact on their business, if they knew that being in a rogues gallery of shame might reduce the chance that people would hire them, then they may well think twice. So you, as the client or the reader need to think twice about whether you should condone such behaviour by hiring or reading the sites of such people.
Anyhow, for those trying to combat the problem of online plagiarism, as you can see there are tools for detection and the evidence is out there to be able to catch the copyright theives, so don’t worry, you can protect yourself and find a happy end to each sorry saga.
An Afterthought for Greg Passuntino and InjoyDesign.com
I take it Mr Greg Passuntino and his pals at InjoyDesign.com won’t be plagiarising this article, nor any other copy-and-paste pirates for that matter! With luck he might indeed post a reply as an article on his site and actually provide the web with some truly original content. I have to ask myself, how much of injoydesign.com is actually original and how much is ripped off.
