Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a rampant disease on the Internet. It is so easy for someone to copy your poetry, make a few changes then post it as their own original work. What satisfaction they derive from that is well beyond me. It happened to me last year and I had no idea what to do about it. I am lucky enough to have an attorney so I told him. He sent the plagiarist a bill for $5000 per poem with a thank you note for the purchase of my poems. They were promptly removed from the Net.
So, I’ve done a little bit of research and found alternative ways to handle offenders and ways to protect yourself. Using AllPoetry is a good start because it dates your work but there is more we can do.
If your work has been stolen try these steps:
1. If your work has been plagiarized and posted here on AllPoetry; tell the moderators they deal with these matters swiftly. It is a major infringement of AP rules.
Addendum: (Do not post the name or pen name of an AP offender; let the moderators handle it.)
2. Find out who the offender is. Look for contact information and if you can’t find any go to this website http://www.internic.net/whois.html there you will find the email of the webmaster. Send them a polite note asking them to remove your poem and send them the page you have it posted here on AP. It has the date you posted it.
3. Next contact the web hosting company that owns the server and report the abuse. (Their information is also listed on the "whois" web site above.)
4. Send a 'Cease and Desist' letter here is a sample: http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/contract/cease.htm
5. File an infringement notice of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm with search engines like Google asking them to remove the site from their search data base.
6. If you need to prove further when your work was copyright you can find it here: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
A way to protect yourself:
I found a wonderful way to protect your work using a web site that monitors your posted pages and will send you an email if your work has been copied. The site is called Copyscape and can be found here: http://www.copyscape.com/
They have a free service and will give you the “cut and paste” HTML to put the protection notice on your poem then you can list the pages you would like monitor with them.
This gif is a link, click on it to visit Copyscape.
Adding your comment:
thanks for this 
