Whose Web Page Is It Anyhow?

Have you ever wondered whether anyone else is using your website material for their own purposes? Or whether your web writer(s) have used any verbiage from someone else’s web page? With all of the information available on the Internet and the millions of web pages available for public view, finding violations of copyright and enforcing them may be difficult.

From time to time, I have found plagiarism on the Internet and I’m sure that there are many undiscovered examples. Last year, I decided to compare the website content that I developed for a previous employer to other web pages. I was surprised when I found that a page on another company’s website was exactly the same as mine with one exception. I mentioned the name of my employer, and the other company substituted the word, “we” for a company name.

You, too, can find out whether your web content has been copied. Just go the http://www.copyscape.com/ and enter the url of any web page that you want to compare. This is the free version and it will return a limited number of similar pages but includes those that are most similar or even identical.

If you do find another web page that is suspiciously like yours, the date of publication on the web becomes important. You can find out approximately when pages were uploaded or changed at the Internet Wayback Machine at www.archive.org/index.php. After you enter the url of the page(s) involved, you will be given the dates that changes were made to that page.

As you can see, it’s easy to use material from one page on another, but it’s also easy to get caught.