The other day, I received an email from my editor that was forwarded from a reader. The subject was “possible plagerism (sic) on About.com”. And it proceded to point to my article on the pros and cons of splash pages and say that it appeared that this was a duplicate of a page on an MLM website. And the email author closed with “and I believe the MLM page was there first.”

This made me angry. Not only was I being accused of plagiarism, but it came on the exact same day that I had just posted a blog post about copyright and the web. So I felt the need to prove that I had written the article and that the MLM site had simply copied it and added "MLM" to the front. But how to prove it? In this case, I used an independent source: Google. Learn how I used Google to help show that my article was live long before the MLM site was even running.

How to Fight Copyright Violations

• How to Show Dates in Google to Fight Copyright Infringement
• First, Find the Violation
• Then, Ask Them to Remove the Content
• If That Doesn't Work, Take More Drastic Action

I don't steal content - and I can prove it originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Friday, November 12th, 2010 at 02:37:20.

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