You create some good content and it gets copied by other people - well, its a common problem that most of us face and we discussed how to get links from your copied content in one of our earlier posts. However, for those of you who would like to know if there are other options to deal with such situation, here are some more tips.
How you can find if your content has been copied ?
Easiest way is to use Google. Just a copy a complete sentence from your article and search for it in Google by putting it within Quotes ( " " ). This would show all the pages that has got exactly the same sentence. The only disadvantage of this is that if the pages that caryy the copied content are not indexed by Google they wont show up in the result. However, if they are not indexed by Google, why should you bother about them ?
What to do next ?
a) Once you find who have opied your content, you can contact the webmaster and ask them to put a proper link and credit note for your website as the original source if you are ok with sharing the content.
b) If you don't like to share the content, you can ask them to take down the content from their website.
c)If they do not oblige, you can file a DMCA ( Digital Millenium Copyright Act ) with Google. You can get more details on how to file a DMCA request at http://www.google.com/dmca.html. Google would investigate the issue and would take the copied content off their index.
d) You can find out the hosting provider for the website that has copied your content and file a complain with the hosting company. Some hosting companies have strict guidelines on copyright infringement and might take down the website but this doesn't happen too often and most hosting companies are not much bothered.
d) As a final step, you can take help of your lawyer.
Hope this helps 