The launch of a new website is always a big event for a webmaster. He spends long days conceptualizing the design or sits with his web design company to make everything perfect. Every website owner spends a lot of time in gathering content for his website. Content that is perfect, describes his business to the hilt and gets visitors interested in reading it.

The moment a website is launched, its content is a target of plagiarists. Until and unless a website is copyrighted, its content can be picked up by hundreds and thousands of unscrupulous webmasters and used to their advantage.

There are thousands of people starting a blog or website everyday and are unaware of copyright laws and issues. And then, there are some lazy bloggers who just don’t care and simply copy paste the content of another websites.

You need to have your knowledge of copyright in place in order to take action against people who violate your websites content. Copyright applies to content along with images, documents, source code etc. It is not necessary to get your website content copyrighted but it is recommended that you do.

Copyright For Users:

Owners have exclusive rights to make copies, create derivative works, distribute, display and perform works publicly. Certain artists have rights of integrity and attribution (moral rights) in original works of art or limited edition prints (200 or fewer).

[http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/distance.htm#law]

Expiration of Copyright:

For any content written after 1978, The copyright period lasts the lifetime of the author plus 50 years after the author expires. After a website’s copyright expires, anybody is authorized to use that material.

How do you know if you’re a victim of copyright violation?

There are various free or paid tools / software’s available in the market which can help a person to keep tabs on the content posted over the net. The free tools might have some limitations over the paid one’s but definitely useful to keep check on the content on Internet.

Free Tools to check copyright violation:

• Copyscape: Free website to Search for copies of your page on the web. There is a option to monitor the web regularly for plagiarism & Check if content is unique and original.

• Virante Web Marketing Solutions: This Tool tries to diagnose the common www vs non-www duplicate content issue by checking the headers returned by both versions of the url, the current cache in Google, and possible PR dispersion. It checks for the common default page error where both the / and /index.html (or other default page) return 200/OK headers.

• Webconfs Similar Page Checker: This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages. The exact percentage of similarity after with a search engine may penalize you is not known, it varies from search engine to search engine, Your aim should be to keep your page similarity as LOW as possible.

• Duplicate Content Checker: Type the two URL’s you want to compare in the form below, then press CHECK.

• Duplicate Content Soft: This checks for duplicate content between two articles and shows percentage. A tool to compare articles for duplicate content. Get rid of “Insufficient disk space”, free disk space, reduce disk fragmentation

What if you catch a person stealing your content?

Simply contact the person through their website i.e. via contact form and send them a warning. If not possible, one can do a who is look up here [www. whois.domaintools.com] and get the contact details of the website owner.

What if the Warning doesn’t work?

Send the website owner a “Cease and Desist order”.

A Cease and Desist (also called C & D) is an order or request to halt an activity, or else face legal action. The recipient of the cease-and-desist may be an individual or an organization. The term is used in two different contexts. A cease-and-desist order can be issued by a judge or government authority, and has a well-defined legal meaning. In contrast, a cease-and-desist letter can be sent by anyone, although typically they are drafted by a lawyer. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease_and_desist]

If the website owner ignores the cease and desist order, simply send the same to his hosting provider. They will realize the seriousness of the issue and take appropriate action.

You can check the sample Cease & Desist Template letters here,

• http://www.abusinessresource.com

• http://www.free-legal-document.com/copyright-cease-and-desist.html

While researching on this topic, I came across a blog who faced the problem of their articles being copied & credits removed.

“I have had to deal with lot of copyright violations for the content our writing team generates but most of them have been by small sites who think they will pass through the crack.” technacular.com

One can refer to the sites below for more details:

• http://www.whatiscopyright.org

• http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk