The Boss of You

A client called me the other day to tell me she’d spotted a seller on eBay who had lifted elements of her product design — but even more blatantly, was adorning her eBay pages with graphics she’d stolen from my client’s website. In these days of digital everything, it’s easier and easier to rip off photos, graphics, and design ideas from other people, and increasingly difficult to protect yourself against copyright infringers.

But one area that’s dead easy to police on your own is your website copy. We’ve been in business over eight years, and we’ve found our own words promoting other people’s web design services dozens of times. My favourite is when they steal our mission statement — and if you can believe it, I’ve seen that happen more times than I can count. They may think they’re being sincerely flattering, but are in fact merely lazy and dishonest. Maybe it’s my past as a teaching assistant coming out, but I have no patience for plagiarizers.

All you have to do is the Google equivalent of random drug testing.

Highlight a sentence (or part of one) on your website with your mouse, copy it to your clipboard, and paste it into Google’s search box, with quotation marks on either side. (The quotation marks tell Google you want to search for that exact phrase.) For example, I usually start my plagiarism hunt by searching for a phrase that appears in the opening paragraph on our website: “Our goal is to serve as a resource for quality website development and information”. Just that much is usually enough to generate a few hits, from the offenders who really couldn’t be bothered to make an effort. (I mean, if you’re gonna steal our copy, maybe take it from somewhere other than the home page?)

From there, I do random spot tests, grabbing a phrase from our most highly-trafficked pages, and areas that are most likely to attract thieves: descriptions of the services we offer, copy about our expertise, and of course, the mission statement (since I know it to be a gleaming bit of tinfoil for those second-string web-designer magpies). I usually turn up a handful of offenders, and I then email them one by one to point out the page(s) on their website that contain the stolen text, and request that they replace it immediately with something they’ve written.

I find for the most part people react quickly and with at least a modicum of shame. Some are polite enough to respond with an apology; others simply update their sites without replying to my emails. I’ve never resorted to legal action, though I suppose I might consider it if the offense were really significant (i.e. if they’d stolen a lot of copy), and persistent.

I recommend setting aside an hour (or less) every few months to check Google for imitators. After all, when you’ve gone to all the trouble of writing your mission statement, the last thing you want is to let someone else cheat off your homework and get away with it.