Mini Review: Copyscape

I do a LOT of writing and every now and then, I stumble across a thief who has taken entire articles without respecting my copyright. But now there is a way for anyone to track down the intellectual property thieves that are rampant on the Web and, if nothing else, render a good spanking by email.

The Copyscape service lets you enter in the web address of one of your pages, and it goes out and sees who has closely similar content. So, even if someone only stole a couple sentences from your site, you can still catch them.

I have to admit it was depressing, not flattering, to see how many people stole my writing (you don't want to hear about the web design firm bearing a religious name that ran my entire logo design article as their own!). But at the same time, a number of the perpetrators were apologetic and changed the content immediately. I suppose I just like that I can catch them, even if I can't stop them.

The free portion of Copyscape will give you a page of results but to find every violator of your copy rights, you will need the paid CopySentry service.