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Everything You Need to Know About Reporting Copyright Infringement

Plagiarism occurs when information available in different sources is used without proper acknowledgment of the content creator’s source. People often indulge in plagiarism intentionally to complete a task that they lack the creativity to complete or are in a hurry to meet the deadline.

People commonly confuse summarizing and paraphrasing as suitable alternatives for original content. Nonetheless, these are also forms of plagiarism.

Summarizing others’ content with little or no change of words, borrowing ideas without acknowledgment, and using digital content such as images or videos; all contribute to plagiarism.

The latter may be termed as unintentional or accidental plagiarism. However, plagiarism of any kind is unethical, and the consequence of plagiarism is the same for all. With the help of different online tools, now it is easy to check for plagiarism.

Given the ever-increasing cases of plagiarism, many writers, publishers, and organizations protect their digital and printed content with the help of copyright tags that limit outsiders’ access.

How Reporting Copyright Infringement Helps The Copyright Owner?

It protects the content creator or organization’s rights and interests as the sole owner of the content. Also, it aims at regulating the use of the same by unauthorized users.

Copyright owners hold the right to press legal charges against the offender under the copyright act to misuse and manhandle unauthorized data. Violation of copyright can lead the offender to face monetary loss if their content fails to pass the copyright checker’s test.  

The very first step towards taking any step against the offender is reporting copyright infringement. A copyright holder can report duplicate content that does not have a proper citation to justify the author’s content’s unauthorized use.

Readers can also report copied work. Since they have access to a vast array of information and data available on the internet, they are the best judge in this regard.

Reporting Copyright Infringement on a Different Platform:

  • Copyright infringement laws are strict, and people deal with duplicate contents with firmness. Copyright protects both digital content and printed ones.
  • For digital content, copyright infringement can easily be detected with online tools, including image, video, and written content piracy. Once a website is found to have duplicate content, the copyright owners can report the copied content that has no source citation mentioned.

Search engines often deal with such care issues by taking down the web site’s content and often penalizing the publishers. Some search engines detect the source site and automatically redirect the user’s search result to the source site without directly penalizing the website with duplicate content. In addition to this, such activities also affect website ranking and search engine optimization.

  • For printed media, one can use other’s content with the help of source citation. But missing a quotation mark and parenthesis can lead to content plagiarism.

It enables the copyright holder to accuse the writers of plagiarism. For printed content, one can check for plagiarism manually for reporting copyright infringement. Compared to the use of software, this process is lengthy and time-consuming. It requires the readers to go through each line carefully and look for hints of plagiarism.

How to Report Copyright Infringement?

  • Copyright Reporting Forms:

Copyright infringement is also a concern on social sites. User-generated content is mostly uploaded to social media. Privacy of such contents is also at stake due to the easy accessibility of information.

The copyright act also protects User-generated content. To raise a concern regarding plagiarism in social media platforms, the users need to fill up the copyright reporting form with the duplicate and original content’s relevant details.

Audio, video, image, or even written pieces stand at the risk of being copied. The content creators must alert the concerned people to initiate the process of reviewing the post.

Once the post is submitted to review websites, use copyright checker and plagiarism detection tools, and determine whether the content one should remove the content from the website or not.

  • Getting in Touch With the Copyright Agent:

It is not uncommon for websites to hire freelancers, who permanently associate with the organization, to look after the content development part. If someone does not adequately monitor the whole process, organizations may face issues such as an accusation of plagiarism.

To check the content’s quality, organizations appoint a copyright agent to avoid facing legal problems with poorly copied work.

Suppose any content is having plagiarism issue or is missing proper citation. In that case, the copyright agent needs to be alerted of the same legal notice about the supposed content theft.

  • Reporting Copyright to the Institution or the Platform:

A website reflects the organization’s work, but sometimes the two become entirely detached parts. Lack of sincerity on the part of the website development affects the content quality and standard.

Sometimes these are not up-to-date, and other times people simply copy content from other sources. To avoid any communication gap in copyright infringement cases, the owners can alert the organization or the platform’s representative directly instead of beating around the bush.

In the academic field, too, plagiarism is a looming threat. Students often use unfair means to complete research papers or presentations.

It is possible for a person to ignore such errors during manual proofreading. However, a copyright checker and plagiarism checker tools quickly address it. In such cases, the copyright owners must report directly to the institutions since they value academic integrity.

Conclusion

The authorities can also report copyright infringement following the copyright act. Specialized branches are dedicated to dealing with plagiarism of different forms and platforms like plagiarism in music, code, printed media, and digital media plagiarism.

In the case of plagiarism of any written text, one should take the help of the plagiarism detectors available online. However, nowadays, people find weird ways to fool others; thus, opting for the best in the market is the apt decision.

Find out what's in your copy.