Thwarting Content Theft - Making Contact

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Once you’ve determined that someone has stolen your content, you need to find out who did it – so you can contact them and tell them to take it down. If the thief posted the content on his own domain, you can track him down by doing a Whois search. If the site uses an anonymous service, don’t let that stop you; those often forward email to a real account, so they should get your message.

If the content is on a social network, you’ll probably have to create an account on the network yourself so you can contact them. Bailey recommends that you keep your personal email address private when you do this, and suggests using 10 Minute Mail to create a temporary email account for registration emails.

Even with these options, you may find yourself unable to contact the plagiarist quite so directly. In that case, if it’s possible, you’ll need to leave a comment on the site. And you may need to monitor the site for a little while for a reply.

So what should you say? Tell the plagiarist that you own the copyright to that article. Give the name of the item and the link at which it appears on the plagiarist’s web site. Include the link where it appears on your web site and give the date it was originally published. Point out that you have not authorized the plagiarist’s use of your work. Tell them to remove the work from their site, and if they fail to do so after a set period of time (as short as 72 hours), you plan to take action which may include contacting the site’s administrators and/or your lawyer. If you are already dealing with the site’s administrator, you can tell them that you will contact their web host. Plagiarism Today has some excellent form letters for this situation and others, such as those that I’ll discuss in the next section.

Next: Escalation >>
 

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