Some say that imitation is tantamount to flattery, but in the world of online intellectual property, it is not the least bit flattering. From the time you publish a new article on your site or blog, there are crawlers scouring the internet in the hopes of finding newly-created content that can be plagiarized and used for undeserved gain. Most of these attempts do not even rewrite the articles in question; they simply work by pinging online sites and take the content for their “owners”, copying them word-for-word. While this can be devastating when it comes to developing a successful website with unique content, it can be identified and rectified pretty easily.

How to Find Your Plagiarized Work

The most difficult part of filing a DMCA complaint is finding out just what exactly has been plagiarized. You may have been alerted to one instance of plagiarizing by a friend or through your own investigate research, but could there be more instances out there? Luckily, there is a way to find these copied works by using Google Docs. By using this spreadsheet and creating your own copy within Google Docs/Drive, you can begin finding who is stealing from you. Simply input your RSS feed URL into one column and the plagiarized work URL in the following column; this makes the submission and review process go much faster.

How The Sheet Works

After inputting all of the necessary information, the Google Docs spreadsheet will then perform a search of your most recent published posts and begin pinging online sites to compare them to any recent posts on the site that is potentially plagiarizing your work. If a copy is discovered on the other website, the URL is placed into the spreadsheet and is documented. If nothing could be found matching the title or content of the article, then you will most likely see a ‘N/A’ appear next to the entry. This could also mean that Google Search is currently not working; you can easily verify this by doing a simple manual search.

Filing the Report

After compiling the necessary information listed above, filing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act form is fairly simple. You will need to input the full name of the registrant of the website, which will be checked by the hosting company of the perpetrator to ensure you do actually own the domain in question. You will also want to be sure that you have copyright disclaimers listed on your website; at the bottom of the site, for instance, be sure to disclose that all content is copyright of the site and the owner.

You will never be completely safe from prying plagiarizers, but you can always be ready to fend them off by knowing how to file a DMCA complaint. By using the spreadsheet to aggregate information, listing your copyright disclaimer and filing reports as soon as the infractions are noticed, you can avoid both the sting of having your content stolen and also any negative side effects that might arise from a “thief site” recycling your content for their own malicious gains.