Dealing with a threatening email

I had a slightly odd experience the other day - I got this email in relation to one of the articles on my website: "I'll take copyright of this text to myself. I'll fake publishing dates + I have more reputation. What are you going to do?"

Perhaps I'm doing the emailer a disservice and it's just a poorly written request for information, but given the other stuff that they wrote, I doubt that's actually the case. Anyway, it's an interesting question and one that's worth answering in a bit of detail.

The first thing to do, if you're writing content yourself, is to make it easy to check to see if someone else has actually taken your words. Include a couple of 'unusual' words or combination of words. It's then going to be really easy to simply run those through a search engine every few months to see if someone has actually tried to rip you off. A second line of defence is to use something like Copyscape which is a great little resource that allows you to provide it with your URL and it can then check to see if your material, or a substantial proportion of it appears elsewhere. There are both free and commercial versions available. If you're concerned about a particular image try the Firefox addon 'Who stole my pictures?' or use the nice little ability that Google Images now provides us with to find copies of images from a URL or from an image that you upload.

The next point Mr Moron makes in his email to me is that he'll fake publishing dates. That's a lot easier said that done. Simply adding a copyright date at the bottom of an article doesn't actually mean anything of course. It's painfully simple to prove which is an earlier edition of a page, irrespective of what's on a page, since the good old Internet Archive AKA Wayback Machine keeps copies of websites and pages. Then you also have the people who have also linked to a specific page from their own websites which may well have their own dates on them. Then of course you have the search engines themselves, which know when they crawl sites and pages, and they'll also use the original date of publication as one of the ways of ranking a particular page. So that approach isn't going to work either.

We then get to 'reputation'. Reputation is difficult, since it's a moveable feast, but one of the best ways of looking at this is to see who is linking to the particular page in question. The longer an article has been around, the more chance there is that it will be linked to, so using the Google link: search function is going to sort that out very quickly. Reputation isn't something that happens overnight - it's a slow process of growth in most cases, so that's a bit of an empty threat really. Especially when you run a search on the person who sent the email and you can't find more than one or two references to them on sad little bulletin boards. So - not really an issue.

As for the final question - there's no need to actually do anything at all. Other than laugh at the persons stupidity and use it for a blog posting. :)

Comments

[Sarah Davies]

Fantastic post as always!