I knew it would happen one day. Someone copied the text from my website and pasted it into their own. Those filthy rotten scoundrels! To learn how to check plagiarism, click here

According to the website of the United States Copyright Office:

"Copyright protection begins when the work is created in fixed form. The authorship copyright in work immediately becomes the property of the author who developed the work."

What are you going to do?

Here are several methods for determining which websites have stolen your text:

1. Find some material on your website that is so "you" that no one else would create a phrase or sentence like that. Then, go to Google and search for that phrase or statement within quote marks. For example, one of the phrases that I looked up was as follows: "you'll end up struggling to make your business a success, and all your passion and enthusiasm will drain away." (Go ahead and Google it to see who has my material on their site.) You must include the phrase in quotation marks so that Google knows to search for the entire phrase with all the terms right next to each other.

2. List websites that use the exact text as yours. While it's entirely possible that someone in millions of websites wrote the exact phrase, it's worth studying every site.

3. Copyscape is another excellent resource for finding plagiarized websites.

Here are some procedures to take to request a website to remove plagiarized text:

1. Gather as much information as possible about the offending site.

2. Print out all pages from their website that contain plagiarized text.

3. Search the site for a contact name, phone number, and email address.

4. Navigate to internic.net/whois.html to obtain all of their registration details. If they are not in the United States, go to Google and search "whois," followed by the name of their nation. You should be able to locate a whois site to obtain their DNS record on your behalf.

5. Go to Alexa.com and look up whatever information you can.

6. Finally, write to the owner of the infringing site and inform them that you discovered plagiarized language on their site. List the problematic pages' URLs and the copyrighted URLs of your pages. Allow them two or three days to erase or rewrite the pages to remove your text.

This is not the time to be a gentleman! Inform the offending website owner that you will copy their hosting business and domain registrar on the letter or email, and then do so.

Make sure you don't use passive language or use "please" when writing this email or letter. Claim your rights. What they did was illegal and unethical, and they must cease doing it immediately.

Waybackmachine.org is another excellent resource. This allows you to see what their websites looked like throughout time. You might be able to pinpoint when those people ate a heaping spoonful of your site material.

Someone pointed out that the culprit is sometimes the website designer, not the site owner. If you own a website and did not compose the text, ask your designer where they received the text. Make it clear to them that you will not allow plagiarized text and will hold them legally liable for any charge or litigation arising from the copy on your website.

Some final thoughts:

Always include a copyright disclaimer on your website. If you spent a long time writing your work, you should be the only one who benefits from it, not some evil individual searching for a shortcut.

You may need to consult an attorney if the site does not cooperate with your request. Only you can decide whether the cost of hiring an attorney is worthwhile for you.