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[HowTo] Know if someone is copying your Blogposts?

I was at the Bangalore Barcamp 6 or the BCB6 as it is popularly known and one of the most important doubt queried there was related to Copying of Blogs, Plagiarism. Lets learn how to know if someone is copying your blog contents and the next steps after that.

Use Copyscape to know which blogs are copying your content.

Copyspace is a free service which makes it easier for you to find copies of your contents on the web. All you need to do is type in the address of your blog or webpage and Copyscape does the rest. Copyscape finds out the sites which have copied your content without permission and also those which have quoted you. However, Copyscape only provides first 10 searches free, in order to get more searches, you need to be a premium user.

Once you have figured out the names of the blogs or webpages copying your content, the next step is to go ahead and figure out the details about the owner of this blog / webpage. The best way to do this is going ahead with the About page of the blog or website, Usually the About page has all the details you need to contact the website or blog owner. In case, if that doesn’t work out you should do a WhoIs search. To do a WhoIs search, point your browser to the URL http://whois.net. WhoIs.net is a free service which provides with the WhoIs records of the owner of the website.

Free WhoIs records engine.

Once you have the details of the copying blog or website with you, the first step is usually going ahead and dropping a nice email asking for attribution. If the copying blogger responds back, good for him/her, otherwise you might have to go ahead and file an official DMCA Complaint or even contact its advertising partners like Adsense. Amit Agarwal has an interesting list of To-do’s on this topic. You can find his post on dealing with online plagiarism here.

Reader Update: Copyscape also has an excellent resource page which has excellent material on content plagiarism. [ Thanks to Himanshu Sheth for this pointer.]

For doing Whois lookup and other domain specific queries there is another interesting website called Domaintools . [Thanks Jonathan for pointing out this very interesting resource.]

You might also be interested in reading this resourceful post on Content Theft and Wordpress. [Thanks to timethief for this.]

You can also go ahead and read my previous post on Getting all the technical information about a website like the technology it was built using, SEO profile and Hosting details.

Do stay tuned to Technofriends for more, one of the best ways of doing so is by subscribing to our feeds. You can subscribe to Technofriends feed by clicking here.

You can also follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vaibhav1981

Cheers

Vaibhav

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Free, How-To, Plagiarism, Technology, Tips, Tutorials, blog, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “[HowTo] Know if someone is copying your Blogposts?”

  1. [...] Source Catégorie(s): Informatique, Internet Tags: Copie, Licence, Plagiat Ajouter à:   Digg     Delicious     Stumble     Technorati     addthis_pub = ‘etan’; addthis_options = ‘favorites, twitter, delicious, facebook, digg, myspace, google, email, more’; « Ubuntu 8.04 sort en Release Candidate  [...]

  2. Hi Vaibhav,
    Good one…But Copyscape only provides first 10 results , rest all is for the paid members.

    -Himanshu Sheth

  3. You can also point a link to http://www.copyscape.com/resources.php

    -Himanshu Sheth

  4. Thanks Himanshu for pointing that out. Will be editing the post.
    Cheers
    Vaibhav

  5. While I love Copyscape, I think that Bitscan (bitscan.com) is a natural compliment to it. Not only does it give 20 free searches per month but it offers unlimited results. Though functionally very similar to Copyscape, both seem to catch different sites.

    Second, on whois matters, I find that Domain Tools (domaintools.com) is both more functional and powerful than Whois.net. That is my personal preference though, it’s all about what gets the job done.

    Also, when looking up the host, consider using whoishostingthis.com as it is a great easy tool to use.

    Let me know if I can help you in any way!

  6. I would like to suggest that the next steps to take are clearly outlined in this post http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/content-theft-and-wordpress/

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