The duly noted® blog

If it’s occurred to you to copy word-for-word another individual or business’s work or text they’ve posted on the web; whether it’s an article, poem or their advertising copy, think very – and I mean very – carefully about just what it is you’re doing. 

Forgive me for being blunt, but harmless as you might consider it, the work you’re copying is copyrighted, and if you’re taking it for your own purposes and using it without permission, or maybe worse, putting your own name to another person’s work, then it’s theft, plain and simple. 

Now that’s not me talking; that’s the law of the land.  And innocent as your actions may be, committed in blissful ignorance of whatever statutes are being breached (and I admit such acts of copyright theft can be done innocently), that will nonetheless be no defence for you if – or more likely when – your plagiarism is found out. 

Think I’m being a little dramatic stressing “when”?  Well, if you’ve ever done this, or are contemplating it, the following cautionary tale will hopefully convince you I’m not kidding.  It is a true story, though I am however witholding the names of those involved to protect both the innocent and the guilty. 

Back in early January last I was contacted by a man who had a problem, and it was this; he was facing litigation by a company for – get this – copying three lines of text from their corporate website into his own.  Three lines of text.  Hardly sounds worth getting litigious over, does it?  He even quoted them to me, and believe me it still didn’t look like much to get all in a tiswas over.  To that large corporate body however, once they’d spotted this act of alleged plagiarism, it was all they needed to make contact, and make demands.  And you can imagine these demands were just that; ‘cos when you’re a Goliath facing a David, you feel in a pretty strong position to make whatever damn demands you want. 

And what demands they were!  This powerful organisation ordered the alleged plagiarist to shut down his site – not just remove or change the offending text, mind – but shut down his site entirely.  As he was also effectively a competitor in the same market as them, they also ordered him to agree in writing not to advertise products he sold in competition with them in any media whatsoever for a whole year.  In effect then, though he could still trade, they weren’t wanting him to market himself.  Nor could he associate himself with rivals to the Goliath organisation.  Finally, to cap it all, it appears even if he complied with these demands, he would still be facing a compensation claim from them for his illegal act. 

Now this man – it seems right to call him David – was in a really difficult- no; impossible position.  By the time he contacted me he’d already switched off his site to show willing, but he couldn’t see how he could give in to the Goliath organisation’s other demands without it ruining his business.  What made his situation doubly excruciating was the fact that he was a sole trader – he was not operating as a limited liability company.  His business status therefore effectively made him personally liable to pay damages to the Goliath organisation whose rights he’d allegedly infringed.  So legal action against him could now not just kill his business, but cripple him financially. 

And all for copying three lines of text. 

All I could do was offer him this advice; find a lawyer.   

Y’know, the sadly ironic thing about this tale is that yes, David is guilty – by his own admission to me – of copying the offending text, but not from Goliath’s site; he lifted it from one of their competitors!  The third party competitor must have lifted Goliath’s copy. 

Now I’m not going to comment as to the scale of Goliath organisation’s response – maybe it was nuclear, maybe it wasn’t – how they respond in protecting the IP rights is really up to them.  Perhaps being known to take only the hard line is for them the best protection against IP theft.  But that’s not the point of this tale, which is to demonstrate that for whatever reason lifting someone else’s web content may bring down the worst of consequences on you.  What happened to David was a result of laziness; he didn’t bother to produce his own segment of copy for his site, and the result spectacularly backfired on him.  What he should have done was take the time to certainly review his competitors’ approach to web marketing and analyse their strategies, but leave it at that and come up with his own marketing webcopy, suited to the needs of his business.  Heck, he might well have produced better copy. 

To summarise then, website content under law is copyrighted.  Period.  And don’t think the international nature of the web is your defence; the fact another site is based over the border should not make you think it’s open season to copy content.  International treaties such as the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention (to name two; visit the Copyright Treaties page of our duly registered^TM site for more info) grant IP protection across borders.  The global village is just that, and no more so than on the web; if you’ve copied others’ content, people can and will find out what you’re up to. 

Still don’t believe me?  Jonathan Bailey of the web blog Plagiarism Today is an excellent example of a man on a mission to stop web plagiarists stealing his own work.  If you’re a web content producer too, and concerned about what you can do to sniff out potential plagiarists, you can find no better a site that goes into exhaustive detail of how an everyday Web-Joe fights the good fight for IP owners like you. 

Or do you want to run your own search for potential lifters of your web content, but don’t know how?  You can make use of Copyscape; a really handy tool for just such a job.  Not only does it enable you to do free one-off random searches, but for a small monthly subscription, Copyscape can automatically monitor the web for you for copies of your pages appearing, and send you alerts. 

Who knows?  Perhaps that’s what Goliath used to discover David’s infringement. 

© 2007 Julian Boote  All Rights reserved.

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