Preface:

Surely, you don't need me to tell you that we live in a time when any Joe Schmoe (sorry Joe) can copy you hard work with just a few, simple keystrokes...

And as anyone can imagine, when you work many laborious hours developing your website's content, it is very upsetting when someone decides to plagiarize your hard work.

This is doubly important if you consider that Google and other search engines could potentially penalize your site for duplicate content.

Recently, we have been ramping up our efforts to develop a new, very detailed business model and corresponding business plan for our company, AB Web Design, LLC.

Of course, a rather large, and very important step in business plan development is taking a look at your competition and asking the following question: What does my company offer that is better than my competition? In other words, what is my competitive edge/advantage?

Conversely, it is also important to ask the question: What does my competition do better than me?

Any worthwhile business plan will need approach both aspects pragmatically, and answer the questions objectively.

The "Meat" of the Matter:

Anyway, while doing competitor research, so that we could objectively answer these essential questions, I found that one of our competitors had decided to blatantly copy-and-paste some of our website content -- with two minor changes; switching out AB Web Design, LLC for their company's name.

Can you imagine my unbelievable and despicable disdain? I nearly lost my mind for about 5 minutes.

After calming down, I called our attorney and asked him how to best approach the situation.

Below, you will find that I have posted an exact copy of the email we sent, minus names and other information that might lead to identifying the violating company.

PLEASE NOTE: This is not an official template by any means, but should you find yourself in a similar predicament, feel free to use it if you'd like.

ALSO NOTE: If you do not currently have any legal pages on your site, e.g. Terms or Conditions of Use/Service, or Privacy Policy, you really need to consider adding them. It is for this very situation that they are essential.

For more info on legal pages, see Legal Pages for Websites (About.com).

Dear FIRST/LAST NAME of COMPANY NAME,

EXAMPLE-DOMAIN.COM is in direct violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as well as AB Web Design, LLC's Terms and Conditions of Use, section 2, articles a and b.

This infringement has been documented, and checked against internet archives.

We are requesting that the plagiarized content, located at "EXAMPLE-DOMAIN.COM/PLAGIARIZED-CONTENT", be removed within the next 48 hours.

Failure to comply within the allotted time frame will result in any or all of the following actions:

1. Provide details of this infringement on our company website and/or blog.
2. Contact website hosting provider (e.g., GoDaddy) in order to shut down portions of the site which are in violation.
3. Report DMCA violations to Google, Bing, and Yahoo in order remove and/or ban said website from the indexes.
4. If required, legal action will be pursued.

Thank you for your compliance in this matter,

AB Web Design, LLC
abwebsitedesign.com

Eureka! A Happy Ending.

Conveniently, as I was typing up this post, I received a response to the email; included was an apology and a promise to remove the content ASAP.

Just checked: It was removed -- *Mission accomplished*

Thankfully, they were fully compliant with no more than an email. Thank you for being a good sport!

Are you facing a similar problem?

READER RESPONSE: Have you had a similar experience? Please leave a comment with your story. What happened, and how did you resolve the issue? If you didn't resolve it, what was the outcome? Was it quick and easy, or did they give you a hard time? We want to hear about it.


Some tools that could help you along the way

• Copyscape - a free plagiarism checker. The software lets you detect duplicate content and check if your articles are original.
• Internet Archive: Wayback Machine - makes an archive of almost every domain, as it existed, at certain intervals of time. Very useful if you need to prove that your site had the content first (eg. www.ab-wd.com archived data).

Other related resources you may find helpful:

• How to Fight Copyright Violations (About.com: Web Design/HTML)
• Copyright on the Web (About.com: Web Design/HTML)
  
• What to do when someone copies your website’s content (startups.com)
• This Web Business (A List Apart Business Articles)

DISCLAIMER: AB Web Design, LLC is not responsible for any actions or repercussions, by any party, due to use of the freely-supplied, example DMCA violation email template.

Copying Photo by Alexander Kalina
Sausage Photo by Piku

A few weeks ago, I engaged in a great conversation about the importance of having a solid company philosophy. It was with a man who worked as an executive for many years at Worthington Industries, a very large, multi-national corporation that specializes in steel processing.

He showed me a company philosophy card that he had received nearly 31 years ago, when he first started working for Worthington, and to this day -- he still keeps the card in his wallet.

He believed wholeheartedly in Worthington's company philosophy, and he has strong feelings regarding many companies who lack a true belief in a common philosophy and goal.

While it's true that many of today's companies have great marketing copy that explains what philosophy they subscribe to, and sure, it often reads like a dream, but more often than not, they are just empty words. Sometimes, the copy is even written to contain marketing buzzwords in hopes to help generate organic website traffic. Frankly, I personally find that pitiful.

Respect, empowerment, and accountability...it's not a new idea, but by today's standards, it certainly seems to be lost in translation.

Upon request, the former executive was nice enough to provide me with a scanned copy of his 31-year-old philosophy card. I will include the scanned images below.

One final thought:
Profit sharing, for any privately-held company, is the best way to keep one's employees engaged. It provides a true sense of commonality between every worker -- from the bottom, to the top of the proverbial "totem pole."

If the employees do well, and in turn, the company does well, than the employees are rewarded. What better way to reward an employee other than providing an ownership stake in the company they work for and sharing in the profits.

It's a simple idea that is sometimes scoffed at, but think about it -- happy employees make the best employees. Remember that.

Starting to show its age!