Plagiarism, How To Deal With It?

Needless to say, we need to protect ourselves from plagiarists out there. As you can see, I've added Copyscape & MyFreeCopyright banners as a counter measure. Don't think it's enough, but adding extra windshield is better than bare hands! You can use Copyscape and MyFreeCopyright banners.

There are many ways to fight against plagiarism, and more specifically, blog contents theft. First thing first, add a copyright notice on your original content. I suggest to put it on your main page if it's a website, or add a sticky topic if it's a blog. In truth, without putting up copyright notice, your work is already copyrighted automatically right after you published it hence Copyright isn't tied to one post/blog/resource just because you explicitly say so. However, putting up copyright is important, because it tells those plagiarists that you own the contents, and warns them that there might be legal proceed if they dare to steal yours.

Here are few useful resources that might help you:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/

http://www.blogherald.com/2007/11/19/5-content-theft-myths-and-why-they-are-false/

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/

Why should we protect our own contents? Because we have the RIGHT to. It's our hard work, and if someone else's profited from it, is it fair? Not only does it's unfair, it's unethical as well. If they want to profit from something we write with hard work, they must notify us, and give us proper credit and commissions. There are much better way than just copy paste our contents on their websites, and claim it as their own....

There are quite a tools to detect plagiarism. I will list few, however.

Google Search: Simply, use your blog contents' titles as a search string. Or you can also pick the contents themselves as a search string. Check the results, and do not omit anything from the result -that's it- if Google omits anything, asks it to display it.
Google Alert: Asks Google to send a periodic email to you containing search results from pre-defined phrases.
Copyspace: Quickest way to search for contents (like Google Search).
Copyalerts: This is a great tool to monitor your posts. I highly recommend you to register on its website and monitor your contents as many as you can.

Be prepared to do extensive searches, yes? :) Nevertheless, protecting our works is worth every effort. Certainly you don't want your contents get stolen but eh, everything is possible in this vast jungle called internet. There have been many cases of plagiarism where big search engine like Yahoo stole bloggers' contents. This is a very disgraceful behavior.

Recently I also stumbled upon plagiarist's blog on BlogCatalog. We (I and several others) have requested him to remove the copied article but he didn't pay any attention to us all. I lost the link to the thread... All I remember is that his blog post was NBA related. Ah well... In case you don't know, social networks are very effective on detecting and fighting against plagiarists.

Also, there's a difference between Disclosure Notice and Copyright Notice. You can see my Disclosure Notice here. Unlike Copyright Notice, Disclosure Notice doesn't protect you from Copyright Infrigement, Plagiarism or such. It only explains what your contents are about.

Last words. be careful and put your nose everywhere.

EDIT: v 0.1: This work has been updated today (10/9/08) so I reposted it, also its a work in progress so expect frequent updates and repost. I added Copyalerts link too on My Links section.
v 0.2: Another small update (23/9/08), republished. I justified all paragraphs, and now it's easier to read. :P Any suggestion for new links to plagiarism-related resources is really appreciated.