Plagiarism and copyright infringement of websites

Although plagiarism had been a problem for companies long before the Internet arrived, the web has made it much easier for unscrupulous individuals or companies to copy and use information or images with a few simple clicks. So if you find that your website has been copied and your copyright has been infringed, what can you do about it?

If a business competitor decides to copy text or information from your website, this can be easily done with several clicks of the mouse. They can also copy the source code of your site, including the optimised metatags, or in the most extreme cases, copy the whole design and structure of a site. We often see forum postings from webmasters expressing a combination of disbelief and disgust when they have found that another website includes their plagiarised content and want to know what can effectively be done about it.

Sometimes this plagiarism is simply the result of laziness or sometimes it is done to try and replicate the search engine rankings of a site that performs well, but simply copying information from sites in the hope that this success can be replicated is a sadly deluded technique! Unfortunately, there are also people who just think that they can make ‘a quick buck’ by copying a successful online business and don’t care who they antagonise – if they get found out, then they just move on to another project and website.

We’ve suffered plagiarism from our website by 4 different competitors over the past 3 years. They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in most cases such plagiarism doesn’t result in any significant business threat. However, it is intensely frustrating that such unscrupulous companies can set up a website with the minimum of effort by using text and images that we have spent considerable time crafting to reflect our brand and services.

So how can you find out if your website has been plagiarised and what can you do about it?

It’s quite hard to find images that have been copied, unless the culprit has retained the image name or ‘alt’ tag content. However, reproduced copy is easier to find and we use 2 methods to regularly check our pages. Firstly, the excellent
CopyScape website provides a search tool whereby you enter the URL of any page on your site and it will scan other sites and bring up those with a close word match. Another way, which uses the same basic technique, is to simply copy a paragraph of text from your website and place all of it into the
Google search box, which can then bring up any other sites that are using the same information.

CopyScape is also a useful online resource that provides advice on protecting your copyright and
taking action should a competitor start using it. Although it can be useful to have dated copies of all copyright content registered with your solicitor, legal action can often be expensive and drawn out, with limited chances of success unless you can demonstrate an impact on your business.

The best route is to take a copy of the offending page/s, then e-mail the offending website with a polite request to remove the offending material, which will sometimes get a quick result. If not, you can also contact their web hosting company who could be held legally responsible for hosting a site that is infringing copyright and so, depending on their concern to abide by the law, may pressurise the site to remove the content. Search engines should also be contacted if they are indexing the offending pages, as they may also remove these from their listings if the offence continues. Another option is to post a page about the website’s plagiarism ‘ as we have done ‘ which is likely to get their attention if they are concerned that potential clients may look use a search engine to find out more about the business and then see details about their unethical behaviour.

If you would like further information about how to check for copyright infringement or ways to tackle plagiarism, please contact us and we’ll be pleased to help.

Leave a Reply