By Steven G. Mehta

What does Tom Cruise, China, and Top Gun have to do with issues relating to plagiarism?  Well everything,  Just recently, it was discovered that Maverick, Iceman, Goose, Viper, and Jester were all starring in a Chinese Military training video.  To learn more about China’s use of Mav’s sweet moves have a look at the recent CNN video.

The issue of plagiarism, however, is not something just reserved for the Chinese Military. Blogger, Tammy Lenski, has written an interesting piece on what to do when you have been plagiarized.  Tammy gives lots of valuable tips on how to protect yourself.  Here are just two of them from her article entitled,

What to do when someone steals your content on the web

By Tammy Lenski

 

Here’s how my two-step process for handling infringements like these:

  1. Use the contact link on the infringing site to reach out to the site owner, make sure they’re aware that they’ve used copyrighted material, and request that they remove it within two business days.
  2. If that doesn’t work, locate the infringing site’s webhosting company and submit what’s a copyright infringement notice, also called a DMCA notice. DMCA stands for Digital Millenium Copyright Act and there’s more information on it in the links below. In almost all cases, this resolves it, though sometimes it can take weeks. The resolution may be anything from the post being removed to the webhost taking down the site.

 

Tammy has listed many valuable resources to which you can go to if you are plagiarized.  To read her complete valuable and informative article, click here.