If ever you have gone though the media guru’s blog, you must have read that his articles are being copied by basictweak.com. To circumvent such practices, I will try to come up with some major tips to protect yourselves. I have yet to implement them. As a matter of fact this article is the product of inspiration to fight plagiarism.

Copyscape – The first thing you should know, there exists copyscape.com. Enter your URL, and a list of websites having same or similar contents (partial) will be compiled. From these you can decide who is copying what. Well, this applies if you have not copied from somewhere else.

Creative Commons – We all ponder should we license our work or not. My advice, license it. Creative Commons is here to cater your needs. You choose the type of license you want to attribute to your work. The below gives everything about the license.

Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any member of the public but only on certain conditions.

What conditions? You can find an overview of the Creative Commons licenses here. All of our licenses require that you give attribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

Example: Jane publishes her photograph with an Attribution license, because she wants the world to use her pictures provided they give her credit. Bob finds her photograph online and wants to display it on the front page of his website. Bob puts Jane’s picture on his site, and clearly indicates Jane’s authorship.

Our core licensing suite will also let you mix and match conditions from the list of options below. There are a total of six Creative Commons licenses to choose from our core licensing suite.

Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only

Examples: Gus publishes his photograph on his website with a Noncommercial license. Camille prints Gus’ photograph. Camille is not allowed to sell the print photograph without Gus’s permission.

No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Example: Sara licenses a recording of her song with a No Derivative Works license. Joe would like to cut Sara’s track and mix it with his own to produce an entirely new song. Joe cannot do this without Sara’s permission (unless his song amounts to fair use).

Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Note: A license cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options. The Share Alike requirement applies only to derivative works.

Example: Gus’s online photo is licensed under the Noncommercial and Share Alike terms. Camille is an amateur collage artist, and she takes Gus’s photo and puts it into one of her collages. This Share Alike language requires Camille to make her collage available on a Noncommercial plus Share Alike license. It makes her offer her work back to the world on the same terms Gus gave her.

More examples are available on our examples page. Also note that every license carries with it a full set of other rights in addition to the allowances specifically made here.

Taking a License

When you’ve made your choices, you’ll get the appropriate license expressed in three ways:

1. Commons Deed. A simple, plain-language summary of the license, complete
   with the relevant icons.
2. Legal Code. The fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in court.
3. Digital Code. A machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use.

Using a License

You should then include a Creative Commons “Some Rights Reserved” button on your site, near your work. Help and tips on doing this are covered here. This button will link back to the Commons Deed, so that the world can be notified of the license terms. If you find that your license is being violated, you may have grounds to sue under copyright infringement.

From: Creative Commons

This generator assigns all the attributes of your selected license type and generates the html code. Do it now. 😀

ISSN – We all heard of ISBN (unique reference for a book),and today it is ISSN. It is an International Standard Serial Number used to identify your digital work online. Be part of it. Here is the list of all the centres (worldwide)

For Mauritius, below are the concerned information.

 

Bibliothèque Nationale de Maurice

Country code: MUS

Centre code: 61

Bibliothèque Nationale de Maurice
2ème étage, Bâtiment Fon Sing
12, rue Edith Cavell
Port Louis

Telephone: +230-210.7121 / +230- 211.9891 / +230-211.9892
Fax: +230-210.7173 / +230-210.7117
E-mail:
Website: http://national-library.gov.mu
Director:
M. Yves Chan Kam Lon
Directeur

After or during my exams I will proceed to register Geek Scribes.For the sake of having an identity. Your ISSN can be used as a reference in cases of plagiarism for fighting your case.

Contact Webmaster – Webmasters often tend to ignore emails concerning contents they have scraped from you. A better solution is to perform a WHOIS and email either their web host or their domain registrar.

My favourite WHOIS is whatsmyip. You will have the registrant details associated with the domain name. If ever they are all false details, you will end up with square 1, that gives you one. There is still hope, see the name servers. Perform a whois on it/them or go to the “adomainame.com/net/etc” extracting it from the name server. If there are any contact form report issue and see if any actions are taken.

DMCA – The last but not least, ask Google to de-index the concerned web site. For such a process you need to perform a DMCA. Check Google DMCA page for more info about this one.

Update: Thank you Jonathan Bailey, your comments has made the article become more meaningful. Yeah, the word of a pro. 😛 Fighting plagiarism is his niche, check out his weblog out and have a boost in knowledge. 😀

According to his recommendation it is preferable to work with Google. That is getting the web site de-indexed. I would second that. But after being de-indexed from Google, we may access the web site directly with its domain name. My word, plagiarism is an art in itself, needing some brains and patience. 😀

Along side with copyscape do use bitscan. No need for a premium account as copyscape.

Well carrotmadman6, partial feed is a solution. But we all love full feed. Copying contents automatically is done via feeds. It is virtually impossible to protect it. There are other methods to do so. Like, in blogger settings go to “site feed” and have a link back to your weblog or put your ISSN number in there. For wordpress I think there is some plugins that do this job. I will just need to search for one. 😀

I hope I have been able to draft a clear picture of what needs to be done and this would help.