Have you ever found that your website copy has been plagiarized?

About once a month I check out Copyscape that allows me to run a search on some key pages of my site. Almost every month I find someone new who has grabbed some or all of my home page content and used it for their own.

In some cases I’ve emailed the company. Sometimes they take it down, other times they don’t.

I’ve also blogged about some of them. Some were shamed into taking the content donw.

I’ve even called one guy who told me I should be flattered. (I believe it’s imitation, and not plagiarism that’s supposed to make me feel flattered, but whatever.)

How would you handle it?

@donpurdum

Well, it’s one thing to “quote” someone, quite another to copy and paste our home page copy onto theirs!

I had one real estate agent client who, after seeing a previous post of mine on Copyscape, tried it and found an agent from another part of the country that had copied and pasted multiple pages to their site.

What was worse is they didn’t even bother to change the company name, or the references to Maine!

Oh, well.

I’ve had run ins with copy cats. In most cases I’ve just emailed them and explained they’ve breached my copyright or IP and they’ve backed down. I recently filed a trademark application to protect my business name as someone had set up a copycat Facebook page using my biz name in the title. Facebook will only shut another page down if you can prove trademark rights to the name. In this case, the person has agreed to shut down their page themselves.

@debbielynnava

Wow! Unbelievable. I bet they don’t even know they can found out?

I don’t know if it will make any difference but I just registered my blog with myfreecopyright and have their logo at the top.