One of the first things I learned in school was not to copy anyone else’s work.
It is a common misconception by some bloggers on the internet, not those on families.com that copying and pasting a complete article from another website is completely acceptable as long as you site the original source. That simply is not true. Online writers are protected by the same copyright laws that print writers are, and copying an online journalists work is stealing whether you post its contents on your for profit website, or your personal blog without the permission of the original author.
I regularly write for four publications now that are primarily on the web and contribute to many others. When you publish close to a hundred articles every month on the internet, it was only a matter of time before someone started stealing them.
The website Copyscape is designed to help online journalists and bloggers fight back against the people stealing their work, or at least be able to find their attackers. The way the site works is rather simple. On the sites homepage is a place to type the URL of your webpage. You type in your URL, click search and within seconds copyscape will compare your webpage to other websites on the web and return any matches it mat find.
If someone only copy and pasted a portion of your original page then the copied areas will be highlighted so you can see exactly what information was duplicated.
For instance, I am the Mac writer for Suite101.com. That website for a while was a target for people who wanted to copy articles. I have seen what appear to be companies copy large portions of my work, as well as bloggers who thought an article I wrote was interesting and decided to duplicate it in its entirety in their blog.
Right now if you type in my suite101 URL into copyscape (macs.suite101.com) you get four results for copied material. One of them is my Suite101 profile, and two are where I, or my editor, posted by articles on digg.com. The very first result however is someone who has copy and pasted an entire article off of Suite into their blogger blog. The blogger removed my name from the article, but placed a link at the bottom of the page to the original. This violates my copyright.
In most cases if you find a duplication of your work you can contact the site owner and ask them to remove it, and they will. At the top of the screen when you are looking at a duplication of your webpage there is a button to get the “whois” information for the site, that will give you contact information for the site owner. Usually a simple email will have your article removed almost immediately.
Don’t let plagiarizers get away with taking your hard work!