Part of being a small business owner is the excitement of launching your website, invariably days have been spent not just on the design but also the text we are using. When a client hires you they are buying into your personality – which is why the words we use to describe our services is so personal. We always want to portray what makes us the best supplier for clients by the means of images and the words we are using.
Sadly, its not unusual for small business owners to find their hard thought out words and descriptive text on a competitors website. Knowing that someone has just copied and pasted a part of you instead of writing something unique and personal to them, can be frustrating to say the least.
For clarification a simple definition of plagiarism is as follows: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.
How can I check if my site has been copied?
A great website where you can check for copies of your company website (or large chunks of text copied) is copyscape – put your web address into it and it’ll quickly pull up copies – make a note to do this monthly to make sure that your site is not being plagiarised.
I’ve been copied, what do I do next?
Contact the company owner directly by email ideally with a confirmed “read receipt” and inform them of the plagiarism. Highlight what text has been copied and provide screen grabs or link to your website.
Ask them to remove the offending text within 7 days. If that does not succeed then send a cease and desist letter , see an example here
If you still hear nothing you have 2 choices:
1) Contact a lawyer to send a legal letter. You will need to make a decision on how far to take this as the legal costs could escalate.
2) Go onto “whois” to see who is hosting the website, contact the web hosters and highlight what has been copied from your site. Very often this is enough for them to remove the website from the internet temporarily until the text has been removed.
What do you think? Have you encountered this yourself?
We asked some of our members what their experiences has been of copyright.
“We had all the text from our very first web site copied and the person that copied hadn’t even tried to change any words or any attempt to make it look like “her” work.” Sue Parrish, Eleganza Weddings
“Someone set up a Facebook business page using my company name, logo and some images of my previous work. It was only soon after I launched my website and I felt very frustrated after all the work I had put into launching and building my brand.” Ela from Bochic Weddings
“It’s not just words, I had the design of my Website copied and sold as a template.” Andri Benson Always Andri
The directors of the UKAWP take copyright infringement seriously and before a member is accepted into the UKAWP their website is checked for originality.
Photo by Simon Carr
