Protecting your Writing from Plagiarism

I've written things that have shown up on other websites. As flattering as it is that a person or company liked my writing enough to put in on their website, it's illegal and hard on a writer who is trying to get paid for their words.

Unfortunately, people tend to look at the web as one big freebee — text there for the taking. That's why it's important that you take time to protect your work.

Protecting yourself

• Copyright. You can copyright your writing. I say that, but at $45 per pop this can be cost prohibitive if you're not  being paid much for your work.

• Educate the offenders. You can contact the company or person posting your work and explain that what they are doing is illegal.

You’ll be surprised how many people/companies don't know this and are willing to take steps to right the situation. You may want them to give you credit, put a blurb about your piece and link back to your site, or just take it off. 

• Diligently Monitor. Keep tabs on your writing. To see if people are using my work, I'll Google some unique excerpts from my text and see if and where they shows up. It's pretty low tech, but it works.

In T. McSpadden’s article, Tips on Protecting Your Writing from Plagiarism, he talks about other monitoring options, like Copyscape, where you type in your domain name and at no cost other sites as searched for identical content. There are other sites like Plagiarism.org that will search for a fee.

When you Find Them

So far (knock on wood) I haven’t run into an issue where someone wouldn’t remove the text or wouldn’t link back to the original text. 

I’ve heard stories though where writers have contacted the hosting company and insisted the offending party’s website be taken down. Or, if you’re the Associated Press, you might even sue.

It's not healthy to walk around completely paranoid, but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious.