Catch Copyright Theft With Google Alerts

Well, once again I’ve found that someone has lifted some of my copyrighted material and posted it on their website as their own. This time it is a well know jewelry store in St. Louis, MO who has yet to respond to my request to remove my copyrighted material from their website.

I don’t care if it’s an article I wrote to drive traffic to my ecommerce site or a product description (which as you all well know can take some time to fully develop) this irritates the daylights (****) out of me.

I use Google Alerts to find copyright violators. Never use it? It’s very easy. Just go to the Google Alerts. Set up a Google account if need be, enter a search term, answer a few other questions and you’re done. I have my name as a search term and also brief snippets of articles and product descriptions. Don’t make your search term too long as you’ll end up getting numerous unrelated alerts.

If the copyright violator in question has Google advertising on the site, read Google’s informational page on how they deal with violators of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

More info on the subject can be found in the Plagiarism section of the Writing World site. This extremely comprehensive article walks you through the topic and what to do when it happens.