This is a Guest Post written by Rob Greenberg. Rob works at a plagiarism detection service.
“Where there's a will, there is a way”, goes the saying. You can apply these words to virtually anything and anyone, including people who want to copy your website's content and use it without giving you any credit or linking back to your blog as a source. This article describes why some of the most popular ways of fighting plagiarism fail and offers possible solutions.
Can You Stop Plagiarists?
If you research the issue of plagiarism online you will find ideas to help you attempt to prevent others from copying your work:
- Let people know what you allow and what you don't allow doing. Add a licensing page to your blog, where it states clearly what others can or cannot do with your content. Merely voicing your expectations will not prevent others from copying and pasting your content, it will only make you more defensive.
- Write to the site owner and try to settle things first. Those numerous times the author of this post tried to ask the site owners to pull the plagiarized content down, the messages were always ignored. Always.</li
- Visit plagiarism detection websites regularly. While such sites work in the academic world to determine if a student's paper is original, they will only point to the copies of your text, but not remove the problem of plagiarism itself. Additionally, these services are not free, so you'll end up losing time and money.
- Disable text selection. A few minutes of “Googling” will enlighten you how to bypass the selection restriction.
- Watermark your images. If you watermark just a corner of your image it is actually very easy to remove it by cropping the picture.
There May Be Something You Can Do
While the techniques of fighting plagiarism are not effective, it does not mean there is nothing you can do about it:
- Just accept it. If somebody is copying your content it means that they are inadvertently giving credit to the good quality of your text.
- “Do not be attached to the fruits of your labor”. This famous quote reminds us that our task is to do our job and not to worry about wrongful actions of others. Your articles do not belong to you only, they belong to everyone.
- Make love, not war. When we direct the focus of our attention to fighting there is no time left to improve our work and write new outstanding articles. Remember how Facebook tried to take legal action against the services that copied their idea of social networking? They later decided to focus on improving their own service instead and adding new features. Today, it is still one of the most visited websites worldwide.
- To make someone do something, make them want to do that. Write something valuable and useful so that your reader would want to give you full credit for what you've written and say thank you by linking to your post.
- Make it easy for your reader to share. Add the share and social network buttons so that your content could easily get reposted, linking it to your website.
Getting angry about the fact that someone has copied your content is the easiest thing to do. It is worth remembering, however, that no matter how hard you try to protect your text, there will always be someone who will try to steal it if they like it. So instead of getting frustrated about other people's actions, why not channel the energy of your attention into something constructive, positive and useful? The choice is yours.
What do you think about Rob's thoughts on the subject of plagiarism? Let us know if you've had some success fight plagiarism.
