All site owners would feel good in knowing that there are people who actually read their contents. The feeling may not be as awesome though when they see their work copied verbatim or even in part and placed under the name of another author. Plagiarism or copying of content is a rather common practice in the online world because it is usually easy to do.
Why Do Anything About It?
Technically speaking, your content is your intellectual property. That in itself should give you enough reason to do something about copyright issues. Just think of the effort, time, talent, and money that you put into your blog contents before you decide to just let it go at that. You even take additional efforts to promote your blog like submitting it to a reputable lifestyle blog directory, among others. You are even sharing a part of you in it regardless of what kind of blog you maintain. The stakes are too high not to do anything and the benefits derived from speaking up are considerable.
What is the Implication When Your Content Is Stolen?
When your content is stolen, copied, or plagiarized, the possibility of having duplicate content arises. What is ironic in this situation is that the thief sometimes succeeds in getting more traffic than the original. Adding insult to injury is seeing it rank better than yours.
How to Protect Content Against Theft
It is highly recommended that you include a permission post in your blog which specifies what interested parties should do if they are interested in using your content. You can also choose to say that you are not giving permission for all instances. You should also be paying attention to sites linking to yours for any indication that your contents are being copied. There are also sites like Copyscape which can be used to check for plagiarism. There are also some ways to make copying your content and material a little more difficult like disabling copy and watermarking images.
What Should You Do When Faced with Content Theft
If you come across materials that you believe have been copied from your site, you should file a takedown notice with Google so that the offending site will be removed from the search coverage. You can also try making a direct takedown request to the plagiarist. This kind of request is usually heeded by amateurs who think it is not such a big thing to copy. Serious plagiarists usually require much sterner action.