Since I am responsible for original, new content on Dot Journal, it's always been a concern of mine that people will take what we have written and pass it off as their own.

A new service called Copyscape allows you to input a webpage to see if others have stolen your content.

As the internet becomes more and more diverse the ability to ensure that your content isn't being pilfered becomes more important. There are companies that will watch for your content being used, but they are costly and typically only engaged by large companies.

Copyscape says it uses Google Alert technology, which is designed to constantly watch the internet and email you when certain terms are found. The difference is that Copyscape will look at an entire page.

You can see it in action with a couple of examples:

1) Cyberwings: Once upon a time there was a hosting service called Cyberwings. They didn't handle their business and things went downhill. Dot Journal chronicled the spiral in a series of articles about Cyberwings.

As a test I ran this page through Copyscape and it came back clean. No one has pilfered our work. This is great news!

2) Syndicated articles. At Dot Journal there was a time we'd use articles provided by a syndication service. The idea was to use this work as a free source of content and the only condition was that the author received attribution. We ran this article through Copyscape and it found many hits.

While this isn't an encompassing look at the success/failure of the service, it does show that it will work.

Interestingly, the Copyscape site doesn't have any pricing nor future plans listed. It uses the Google APIs, which means that it's access to Google can be limited at anytime.

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