You’ve spent hours, maybe even days writing your blog piece or an article for your website. You’ve reviewed, edited, and finally hit the “Publish” button. Soon after you find out in whatever way that your content has been stolen and now appears on another person’s website – no credit to you. What do you do? What can you do? Infolinks is home to thousands of blogs, so we’re sharing our best blogging tips with you.
Some ways that you can fight back against content stealing:
Know your rights – As soon as you publish something on your site you are covered under copyright law, even without the infamous little ©. But, and a big but, is that people can still use your content under the “Fair Use” clause. Read about it to see what it’s really all about.
Is it worth it?
Do you know anything about this person or have you worked with them before? Could they send traffic your way? Is there any chance that brand exposure can come of this? Try to think if there are any positives that could come of this and/or how you could spin it to your benefit.
If you decide you do want to pursue:
Evidence is key. Take a screen shot of your stolen goods and save it. Speak directly with the person who stole your content by finding their email or contact info from their website and ask them to remove your content. Sometimes this works, nice and easy. If it doesn’t, try to get Google involved by asking them to remove the stolen content. Hopefully this won’t happen too often, as getting stolen material can be a bother to have removed.
A better way? Stop thievery before it starts. Take ownership of your content with Google Authorship and branded visuals. Now proudly display your small © and wave the flag of ownership proudly on your site. Make it hard for bots to steal content from your RSS feed. Create content usage guidelines.
While there is no fool-proof way to protect your content or make sure it doesn’t get stolen, you can take preventative measures. Knowing your rights is half the battle.
Good luck out there!