Cyber-theft is a common occurrence and it is a simple thing to do. In many cases, we only need to copy and paste blocks of text from multiple websites. With a little adjustment, we could create an article from these paragraphs and present it as our own work. This is a plain and simple theft. Unfortunately, because it is easy to grab digital content, the Internet is rife with cyber-theft. With sheer availability of content in the Internet, website owners will eventually find that their work is plagiarized. The most important thing to ask is what we can do about it.
To improve the chance of winning the legal battle, we should make sure that our own website is populated with unique, quality content. Although it is allowed to use any kind of material from public content sources, it is better to use unique content that we create on our own. If we also use others’ content illegally, we will be in a heap of trouble during the legal proceeding. If we want to use articles from other websites, it is important to ask permission to others.
Some facts and statistics can only be required from specific individuals. In this case, it is important for people to cite material. The source of the information should be given the credit. Even if have provided credit to the source, it is important to paraphrase the sentences, but still keeping the information intact and unchanged. It would be a bad thing to copy and paste the content in verbatim; because both sources could be accused of having duplicate content by the search engine. Also, by having unique sentences; search engines will still consider them unique content, even if we use identical information.
It is also important to use the right kind of citation format and our best bet is to use the format most frequently used by other professionals in the industry. We can often perform a Google search on this. Many universities and college have enough material to guide us through creating a proper citation for external information. If we are forum contributors or forum administers; we shouldn’t present others’ world as our own. This is downright unethical and some of the more knowledgeable forum members will dispute our content; which is not a good thing for our credibility.
Eventually, we will have the need for an actual original content that is our own property. We will need to search the web at least once a week to make sure that our works are not picked up by others. We could search the web using different keywords, such as the article title, our name and a string of words that are unique and can’t be paraphrased without changing their meaning. If our works have been published without proper credit or a clear permission, then we need to take immediate actions. The first thing to do is by contacting the plagiarizer. However, if the person who steals our content isn’t responsive; then we need to contact the website’s administrators.