Protect Yourself from Plagiarism: Part I

© 2009 Albert A Rasch and
The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles
.

How to Protect Yourself from Plagiarizers and Plagiarism

Everyone that has visited with me here at The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles has seen how plagiarism can really distract you from the important things in life, like writing. Fortunately I have the time and resources to go after someone and take them down. But what if I didn't? What could I have done to minimize the damage done, or at least wrest control of my work form the criminal?
$g&m f9bd 45kd q!?5.
 
I will admit, that I got quite the lesson on the seedier side of Al Gore's Internet over the last week. I've learned a lot about aggregators, sploggers, spammers, content thief, RSS feeds link strippers, and a host of other web based things that I didn't really even want to know. But I did learn about some tools and tactics to use against plagiarists and content thieves.

Let's start with the basics.

Everyone should have the following or something similar at the header of each and everyone of their posts:

© 2009 Albert A Rasch and
The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles
.
Obviously, do that with your name and the link to your home page not mine.

That you posted your work, is in and of itself enough to legally protect you under copyright laws, but here you are showing that you take it seriously and at least your link is on you post.

Next, you should have at least one link to something else you have done. Have a "Related Posts" section at the bottom of your post. I do it manually; there are other platforms that do it automatically. Also, don't be afraid to link to other people’s stuff that relates to what you are doing. Some people are better than others when it comes to checking who has linked to them. I can't seem to figure it out myself, but John over at For Your Entertainment does a very good job of it. He knows who's linking to who.

Now that you have done the very basics, you can get a little more sophisticated. Come up with a key phrase that you use in your posts. One of them could be a closing phrase that you use to end your posts. I have been using:

Regards,
Albert A Rasch
Member: Hunting Sportsmen of the United States HSUS (Let 'em sue me.)
The Hunt Continues...

For some reason though, that doesn't help when I do a google search. But I really like the whole thing so its going to stay! So now I am working on a good unique phrase that I can place on my posts to further identify them in a search, which leads to the following.

You can use the equivalent of an electronic fingerprint. Create a random series of digits and paste them one paragraph down, between the first and second paragraph. Go up and look at mine. It's between the criminal and the Let's. Oh wait, you don't see it? Take your cursor and highlight that area. Tah dah!

I've colored it close to my background color, and I've made it small. That should be sufficient to allow the spiders to crawl and categorize it.

The next step is to create an email alert for your phrase. Wait about an hour after posting to your blog. Go to GoogleBlog Search and type in your fingerprint phrase. Of course, at first phrase only that one post will appear because you just made it up. But with time any other posts you fingerprint, and any plagiarized, hijacked, ripped or otherwise misappropriated copies of your work will quickly appear on GoogleBlog Search.

So now you have placed in your work the basic protections against copyright infringement. But what do you do if you find your materials on a website with or without credit? In our next installment we are going to look at some of the help that is available for you to wrest control of your work back. There are even a couple of tactical nuclear strikes available to you. Trust me it's fun!

Regards,
Albert A Rasch
Member: Hunting Sportsmen of the United States HSUS (Let 'em sue me.)
The Hunt Continues...