I’m reading blogs on Active Rain this weekend while I’m out of town visiting my family, and come across a blogger who was furious about having some of her web content lifted and used without permission by another blogger. She mentioned a website called Copyscape where you can go and check to see if your web or blog content has had this happen. I did this, and on my website (A Fresh Space) I found that 2 paragraphs of mine from my home page appear to be being used by an organizing/staging company in Tampa which is annoying, but on my husband’s website (Skyline Home Inspection) it was basically hijacked by a company in Ohio. Since I personally wrote and designed both websites, I was a bit perturbed by this, as you can imagine. The inspection website used my text almost word for word on every page. I’m still waiting for calls back – I left messages and didn’t exactly say why I was calling. So we’ll see what happens.
I put a lot of effort and time into designing and writing both websites, and it is just not cool or proper – or legal – to use my words and claim them. This is plagiarism, and theft, as far as I’m concerned. Granted, in many fields, there are some standard things you say about your business – and when you are researching to make a website – it may be an inadvertent and honest mistake to copy a few things. I’m willing to give the organizing/staging company a bit of the benefit of the doubt, but the inspection company – not so much. It was blatant and outright copying. So very not cool.
