Finally Victim of Plagiarism

My personal blog was victim of plagiarism this past weekend where I found a backlink from a site talking about Nerf N-Force swords and it had copied paragraphs from two of my own blog posts to make up their blog post.  There wasn’t a single original sentence in the article, the entire article was crafted from using my own paragraphs.  I contacted the site owner and informed them of the copyright infringement and told them I would be contacting their hosting provider if they don’t remove the article ASAP.

Most of the time if you are plagiarized you don’t know it unless you use copyscape or some other mechanism that monitors your posts online and then reports any duplicate content on other sites, it just happened to me that a link back from this article had me visit and see what it was all about.  The summary mentioned playing Nerf N-Force with their three year old son, and I was like “that is exactly what I wrote” and dug deeper.  If you are a victim of blog plagiarism you can follow the following procedures to have the offending content removed.

• Contact the owner of blog (use contact me form or leave a comment)

• Contact hosting provider (use Network Solutions WHO IS search) to find out who hosting provider of DNS name is.

(I used this to determine the domain was purchased from GoDaddy by Domains by Proxy, Inc.)

Note: Sometimes this only reveals who purchased the domain and where it was purchased from, in many cases the DNS name is purchased from one provider and hosted by another provider and this does make it hard to track down the hosting provider itself.

• Follow up regularly

Follow up with hosting provider, contact information and proceed to escalate issue until the plagiarized content is removed.  It is much easier to have content removed from a free web hosting domain like (Blogger, WordPress.com since those companies are known to be more responsive to removing plagiarized content if you can prove it).  If the plagiarized content is hosted outside of the US, then I have no experience on how easy or difficult it is to get plagiarized content removed from say a Russia or China hosted blog.

You can find great articles and information on blog plagiarism from Plagiarism Today including  a post about how to find plagiarism.

-Justin Germino