Writing on Copyright & Plagiarism

New writers often assume that a copyright protects them from plagiarism. Nothing is farther (not further) from the truth. Copyright law only gives original creators the right to yank into court those who plagiarize their work. In reality, as opposed to the perfect world we all dream, no method exists to prevent others from stealing your writing before or after it is published.

Jonathan Bailey's Plagiarism Today website takes a good stab at explaining it all in great detail with a special focus on the Internet and the recent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), which increasingly affects writers.

To my thinking, the key to the conundrum is knowing how to discover illegal uses of your works. I've written previously about services like Copyscape. Now meet Article Checker and the interesting related blog. On the main page of the website, you can initiate a search for copies of your online content by URL, by uploading up to five text files, or by pasting the suspect text into a window. The special search engine scans the Yahoo! Search, Google, and Microsoft Live services for apparent matches.

Frequently I find my blog posts scraped from the RSS feed via Yahoo and Google alerts set up to search daily on my name, the blog name, and the URL or website address (and variations). Simpler yet is to use Google or Yahoo! to search for a section of text from your work, part that contains a fairly unique word or phrase. Be sure to enclose the text in quotation marks.

Another tack to take is offering limited copying rights up front like the Creative Commons program I've also blogged on before. A new one is iCopyright for Creators. It is also free to use and purports to become a clearinghouse for you to manage licensing of your digital material. The registration produces an interactive tag for you to include with all your digital material (audio and visual, too).