Contact the plagiariser directly

If you’re lucky , you’ll find that the plagiarising webmaster has left  “Contact Us” info somewhere on their website. If you’re not-so-lucky, you’ll be able to leave comments on the website itself . If you’re unlucky, you’ll find that there’s no way that you can contact the plagiariser directly via his or her website, in which case you’ll have to find it through some other means, like through searching the Whois records.

Keep your message short and to the point. There are people who recommend that you serve a DMCA notice or Cease and Desist letter at this point, but personally I don’t adopt that approach. Serving a DMCA notice or a Cease and Desist letter carries the implication that you’re willing to sue the webmaster if he or she doesn’t comply, something which requires a lot of time and effort. My message usually reads

” This article was plagiarised from (link to insert article) without my permission. Kindly remove it.

Iakul, original author “

If the webmaster complies within a few days, I’m willing to let the matter drop.There’s no threat of suing them at this point in time simply because there are other options that I can look at if they don’t comply like…

Contact the web host/administrator

If the plagiarised article is posted on a personal website or blog, it’s going to be hosted by a web hosting or blog hosting company. Most of these sites have something in their ToS or guidelines that forbid plagiarised content, and even if they don’t explicitly say so in their ToS or guidelines, a web host or blog host will likely be uncomfortable with hosting a site engaging in illegal activities (plagiarism is illegal!). Contact them and request that they have the article taken down.

If the plagiarised article is published on an article directory or content site, these sites will also be likely to forbid plagiarised content. Same thing here. Contact them and request that they have the article taken down.

How my message reads when contacting a web host or administrator

“Site hosted by web host/Writer on content site has plagiarised my article without my permission. I would appreciate it if you could remove it.

Link to offending article : (Link)

Link to the original article : (Link) “

Contact the contextual advertising program that they use

A large number of sites use Google Adsense as their contextual advertising program. Google does provide guidelines for reporting copyright infringement right here.  However, those guidelines seen to be for the steps you have to take when you’re prepared to sue, which is likely to turn into a costly and lengthy process.

For those of you not keen to take that route yet, use the Google Spam Report to report the plagiarising site that’s using Google Adsense. Tick the “duplicate site or pages” option and include details like a link to the original article and your contact info (if you want to get a reply from Google)

For other contextual advertising programs, they’ll likely disencourage plagiarised content from webmasters using their services as well. Writers who have been plagiarised can also attempt to contact these contextual advertising programs.

This (likely) won’t result in a lawsuit, or having the article taken down. But it’ll give you the satisfaction of ensuring that the plagiariser doesn’t get to earn anything from plagiarising your content.

Report the offending site to search engines

Most major search engines have some way that you can report spam and other unsavory content. While reporting a plagiarising site to a search engine won’t erase it from the face of the web entirely, you can at least ensure that it gets hidden away in some dark corner of the web. For Google, use the Google Spam Report . For Yahoo, the Yahoo Search Spam Report Form. Given the large number of search engines available, I personally feel that it’s not going to be a productive use of your time to report a plagiarisng site to every search engine, but if you are going to attempt to do that, most of the other search engines will require you to e-mail them if you want to file a report.

Contact other writers who have been plagiarised

It’s likely that the plagiarising site won’t have plagiarised exclusively from you, and will have plagiarised from other writers at some point in time. Use Copyscape to check if content on the plagiarising site that has not been written by you also turns up somewhere else on the web. Chances are, that’s the original article. (Unless the plagiariser has been plagiarised, although checking the timestamps should make it clear.) Contact these writers and inform them that their content has been plagiarised.

Alternatively, since checking articles via Copyscape and finding  and verifying the original writers one by one is tedious work, which I can attest to form personal experience, you could post about the plagiarising site in a writing forum and hope that you’ll be able to get in touch with plagiarised writers.

Other writers also deserve to know that their work has been plagiarised and together, you’ll be able to exert more pressure on the plagiariser.

Sue them

If you have tried all other means and still failed to get the article removed (or the website penalised), perhaps it’s time to look into suing them. Being no lawyer, I’m not going to claim that I know the exact and correct procedure to go about doing this. I know that it’s preceded by a cease and desist letter to the plagiariser, however what comes after that is probably best left to a lawyer to tell you. Incidentally, if you have done what I mentioned in 5) and have contacted other writers plagiarised by the site, it’s possible for you to look into filing a collective lawsuit.