Not every case of content theft is done with intent and there are many website owners who are unaware of what constitutes copyright law with regards to website content.

Keep records

• Keep a record of any pages where you have found your website content.
• Take screenshots of the page and take copies of the HTML code as well.

Check if there are references to your site

• Make sure the site owner hasn’t made a reference to where he obtained the content from.

Contact the owner of the site

• Most websites should have a page with contact information. If they don’t, then use Whois to find out who the site owners are. Send a professional email to the owner and ask them to remove the stolen content.

Notify the ISP that is hosting the site

• Send their ISP an email advising them of the site that is hosting stolen materials. If the ISP investigation finds that the site is using stolen content they can remove the website from their server.

Report the site to Google AdSense if they are hosting Adsense advertising.

• You can email adsense-abuse@google.com and inform them that the site is earning revenue off your stolen content which is a  violation of the Google  AdSense Terms of Service. More information about how to report this can be found here.

Plagiarism of blog and website content should be a concern for anyone who has a website or blog. Your website or blog content can easily be copied and used by anyone. After making slight changes, your content may be claimed as their own.

How can you find out if your content has been plagiarised?

Copyscape is a website that provides a free service that makes it easy to find copies of your content on the Internet and to protect your site against online plagiarism and content theft.

You can type in the address of your web page and Copyscape will find sites that have copied your content without your permission, as well as sites or blogs that have quoted you.

The free service is limited to 5 searches for your website per month so if you want to perform unlimited searches and more comprehensive results you can subscribe to Copyscape’s Premium Service.

The Copyscape website also has an online forum for discussions about plagiarism.