How to Protect Your CopyRighted Material
Are you doing everything you can to protect your copyrighted articles?
In the fast moving internet blogging world there are many articles and many
websites looking to hook up with each other. Some people think nothing of
grabbing sentences, paragraphs or even whole sections of your copyrighted
articles and placing them on their blog or forums. What can you do to protect
yourself?
Well, I have found a couple of instances on the net of people inappropriately
grabbing large sections of an article I wrote and just placing it on a forum.
In one case the person that did that actually gave me credit for the article
and a link to the actual article. But, it is still wrong. I don't know if they
meant to steal my article and destroy the copyright on it or if they just
thought it was important information and wanted to share it with others.
There is a right way and a wrong way to quote other's works without messing up
the copyright of the article. The way this guy did it was wrong. It is
generally okay to summarize an article in a brief paragraph of maybe 2 or 3
sentences without copying the article word for word. Then place a link and a
meaningful anchor title for the link next to the article and have the reader go
to the source to read the rest of the article.
You might want to protect your copyrighted articles, but you may be wondering
how to find websites that have ripped you off? Well if you are in the top 10
results of the SERPs and you suddenly find that you have dropped off, you might
want to look at the web pages ahead of you. Read their articles and see if they
have copied your article into their pages.
Another thing you want to do is to find articles that link to your website.
Because some people aren't being malicious and they want to give you credit for
the article, they just didn't do a good enough job of summarizing. I actually
found the latest abuse just in this manner. I placed this query,
"youcanlearnseries com" -site:youcanlearnseries.com, in Google and then began
to look at some of the web sites that had referenced my website. I wasn't
specifically looking to find someone copying one of my articles. But, some
things will pop out at you and make you want to question how they were using
the information. When you dig deeper you might be surprised.
Why should you care if large portions of your original article is stolen?
What effect will the copying have on my original article and the copyright of
the article? It could lead someone else to claim credit for your original
document. They could make a ton of money off of your article and you might get
nothing.
Plus, further down the road the Google robots could see the two articles as
duplicate content. Now, which one do they choose? Your original copyrighted
article that you are trying to protect or the article the other guy placed on
the web? I would think you would be concerned that traffic is being redirected
to the other page. And everyday your article is seen on the other website you
lose.
How do you stop them? Well, you have to be vigilant. Whenever you find someone
has copied your document you need to contact that person immediately. If it is
on a person's blog you ask them to remove it. If it is on a forum, contact the
moderator or administrator. Ask to have the article removed immediately. You
don't have to be rude about it, but you should be confident and concerned.
Hopefully that will be enough to have the article taken down.
The recent problem I had occurred on a forum called
HostBidder.com. I don't think the person who placed the information on
the forum had an ill intent. He was just a little too ambitious with the amount
of the article he placed on the forum. I want to shout out a loud KUDOS to
Fergal the administrator / owner of HostBidder. He immediately took action on
the original placement in the forum. He was even kind enough to leave the link
to my site. I really appreciate it.
What else should you do? I read an article just last week about
Why You Should Register Your Copyright. This article was written by
Sarah Bird, Esquire, of SEOMOZ.org. It is a must read article for anybody that
writes articles and places them on the internet. You write an eBook, an
article, whatever, make sure you follow the suggestions of this lawyer. Now not
all of the United States laws apply internationally, so that will always be a
problem.
This article will help you out as you write your thoughts and research and
place the information on the world wide web. Some people will copy your
articles out of ignorance, some will steal your articles for their personal
gain and others will just do it to be mean. You have to be like a company with
a brand. You have to fight to protect your investment in time and effort. You
have to notify people immediately when you see a wrong occur and not be afraid
to take them to court to protect yourself and the articles you write.
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