Copyright

Copyright problems are not just caused by people on the Internet stealing your company information. Your own staff or even management team can cross the line, as you learned in the case study at the beginning of this chapter.

To monitor your articles and blog posts for copyright infringement, you start with monitoring for online mentions of your company name. As we have already discussed, the basic free service provided by Google Alerts lets you do this. To get more granular, you have to monitor for particular titles of articles and posts to discover if your material may have been stolen. You can also use plagiarism-checking software to look for lifted material online. Services can scan the Internet for similar material and notify you. For example, Figure 13-3 shows how you can use PlagiarismDetect.com (a commercial site) to see if your content is being used somewhere. (We, the authors, took a blog post from our own site and searched for it as a plagiarized work.) The results show the one place where the same material was found and reported that plagiarism was rampant for our post. You can also use one of the free checkers, such as Dupli Checker at http://www.duplichecker.com/, to search for your content.

Figure 13-3 PlagiarismDetect.com searches for copied material.

Once you have a firm grasp on the tools needed to manage and protect intellectual property and copyright, you need a process for utilizing your tools to respond to any potential incident.