Been Plagiarized? Find Out with Copyscape
With your Web site copy available to anyone with an Internet connection, it's very easy for another company to "pay homage" to your content by swiping it. However, with a Web site called Copyscape, it's just as easy for you to find out where your copy may have ended up. Copyscape is free, although there is a premium service available.
A few years ago, while doing a casual search, I discovered that our own government had taken an article I had written and posted it to their site without giving me proper credit. (Actually, without giving me any credit.) The only changes they had made was taking out the funny parts.
More recently I discovered Copyscape. At Copyscape's home page you can enter in a URL (say, your home page) and Copyscape will search the Web to bring back other sites that may be uncomfortably close to your own writing.
I've used it before to uncover several sites that were plagiarizing our copy, and most of the sites have since taken down the offending text. Today, as I was writing this post there were only two sites that came up, and one of them was a blog comment on a French blog that I think was complimenting us. (Thanks to Babel Fish.)
The other makes me think we've been outsourced. Here's our current home page content:
And here's the copy:
You can click on either for a bigger version. As you can see, it's not an exact copy, but it's pretty damn close.
Is there someone out there taking advantage of your hard work? Find out today with Copyscape.
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