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July 10, 2004
Amazed Once Again
I've had my website for about six years now. Every so often, I check to see whether anyone has plagarized any of my material. Yesterday I decided to check out a new site called Copyscape that is designed to find copies of your content on the web. Previously, I had used a similar site whose name I can't recall at the moment.
Copyscape did a fair job. It did identify some but not all of the sites that have stolen my content. I had seen some of these sites before; others were new to me. What always amazes me, though, is the number of professional, commercial sites that violate my copyright. Somehow, it bothers me more to find my material on these sites as opposed to, say, non-profit sites (which also steal my stuff). So I was once again amazed to find that this site has stolen both my Proposal Checklist and my Proposal Pointers. They combined both of these pages into one page, replaced my copyright notice with their own, and changed the source code to remove my identifying information. You would think that the CEO of this commercial site would know better than to steal others' material. This so-called "professional woman" is not a business newbie -- she's the President of a local chapter of a national association. But like so many others, she decided that it would be so much easier to steal someone else's material for her site than to create her own. And she probably figured that no one would ever know.
So once again, I feel compelled to protect my copyright, which is officially registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. Yesterday, I sent off a cease and desist e-mail, demanding that she remove my material by midnight on Tuesday. If not, I will proceed with other actions. It will be interesting to see what happens. I've had to do this quite a few times, and in all cases but one, the offending site removed the material voluntarily. I've heard all the excuses too -- I didn't know, my webmaster did it, I thought it was material in the public domain, etc., etc. A few years ago, the online library of a major university copied about 10 pages of my site in their entirety. And the librarian responsible for this had actually published articles on plagarism, which I found on the web. Another site removed my material and then put it back up a couple of months later. Last year, an academic writer copied my Services page and then claimed she had written it herself until she learned about my registered copyright. Amazing.
Fortunately, I've learned a lot from my lawyer...
Posted by Deborah at July 10, 2004 06:35 AM
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