Forum Moderators: not2easy
I recently noticed a number of refererals from copyscape in my logs. After checking the referring url it showed a page of my site with a sentence highlighted. I'd not heard of this site before but it's clearly some form of Google based copyright infringement search.
All of the content in this section of my site was written by a freelancer so I'm concerned that he may have "ripped off" the content. Although I've searched Google for the sentence and it's only found on my site.
I don't believe that my copywriter would have done this, but it got me thinking what would the consequences be for my site it he did?
Any advice appreciated.
Previous thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
It was probably the copywriter using it :)
I ran some of my pages through copyscape and a few pages came up. One time, it was because I recommended a certain book with a long title. Other people who'd recommended the same book showed up in Copyscape. But it was obvious that we'd only been naming this same long-titled book.
Another time it was a guy's "how to" page. He was describing how to do a certain thing, and he was using some identical phrases and keywords that I had used. But the phrases and words were just here and there—it wasn't like he'd copied whole paragraphs or anything. So it was just a coincidence. (And even if it wasn't, and he'd gotten the idea for his article from something I'd written, there would be no way to prove it since it wasn't similar enough, you know?)
So that's all that's happened here. It was very likely a coincidence, or even if not, it's simply not enough to call an infringement or to get really worked up about.
I think I over-reacted a bit as I didn't write the content myself. I had a horrible feeling that all of the work I paid this guy to do was "borrowed" from elsewhere. I've checked a lot of the other stuff he's written and it all seems fine.
Just out of interest, if the worst case scenario was true what could happen to my site? Would I just have to remove the content to avoid prosecution? Or would that be a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted?
Thanks
If the person really felt that you'd copied enough to be a copyright infringer, most likely they'd contact you, perhaps send a Cease and desist letter, write to your web host and/or ISP and complain. It would be hard to imagine that they'd sue right away without doing these other things first. And it's even harder to imagine that they'd do any of these things for a few similar phrases here and there.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, just sort of my own horse sense. I wouldn't worry about it too much if it's just fragments of sentences or just one sole sentence. However, if more than a few entire sentences are identical (which does not sound like is the case with you), then I'd just go through those and re-phrase them a little.
It doesn't sound like this is the case with you and it really doesn't sound like you have much to worry about, though.
