Image via WikipediaInternet plagiarism is on the rise ... This means that if you have created a great website that has loads of useful information, then there is a good chance that someone will copy that material or duplicate the entire website and republish it as their own. This duplication of internet content is a frequent problem that can damage a websites reputation with various visitors (i.e., consumers) as well as with various internet search engines. There is no excuse for taking someone else's web content without giving them credit. The plagiarism begins with not citing an the work of an author -- to make matters worse -- the offender will then try to disguise this stolen content with cosmetic changes such as adding pictures, paraphrasing, or reformatting the content.
Unfortunately, the World Wide Web (W3) is so massive it would seem that there is no defense against someone's web content from being stolen. If you have a website that is popular and has useful information, it's probably smart to register this web content for a federal copyright. Accomplishing this task will be the first step in taking a proactive approach to protecting your website content against intentional spam or internet plagiarism. Having a federal copyright will allow legal recourse against plagiarism if things cannot be resolved or if things get really ugly.
How to get a Federal Copyright?
To protect your website content against plagiarism file for a website copyright that is enforceable throughout the United States by visiting www.copyright.gov. The U.S. Library of Congress manages the U.S. Copyright Office and they consider websites to be software programs. Therefore, placing a valid copyright notice onto a website will require the following after is has been registered:
- © – this is the copyright symbol that is a universal symbol used internationally
- Year – this is a designation that represents the year the website content was copyrighted
- Author name – this is the name of the owner of the website content.
Example: © 2010 Jeff Rooney of Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Duplication of Internet Content
The duplication of content is a serious problem on the internet where you have what is called "clueless newbies" taking someone else's website content but don't realize that they've done anything wrong.[1] At the more sophisticated level, there are computer robots taking website content that is duplicated on more than one website. When a search engine such as Google scours the internet and its spiders index the content on websites into their web servers (or databases) it tries to detect whether or not a website is a copy of another website anywhere on the internet. A spider will try to make a determination of which website is the original or true version and which are websites are duplicates -- it may or may not be accurate.
Although there is no penalty for duplicate content detected by the spiders, the filtering of duplicate content could hurt a websites ranking which could mean a loss of business revenues captured from that website. The loss can then be interpreted as a loss of business revenues in which is a major consequence when a business website loses its ranking on a search engine.
Researchers looking for reputable websites is another concern, namely, it's a concern that asks the question: Who should get the credit for the website content? A researcher or a website owner needs to determine whether or not the web content or the accessed web content has been stolen; this is imperative step. How can this be done?
To do this, use the free or premium services offered by Copyscape at www.copyscape.com that will report the websites that have been scraped and it will show the offending URL's in the results report, but most importantly – that is, from the perspective of a researcher – it will show where the website content has originated; this will free-up potential citation errors for research papers quoting content on a specific website.
Definition: Scrapers are people who send a compute robot to your website to copy (or scrape) the entire site and then republish it as their own; this is a copyright violation and is also theft.[2]
[1] Urban Dictionary
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clueless%20newbie
[2] Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scraper_site
