I’ve heard more than one discussion lately about pirated website copy – it seems that some “Virtual Assistants” have been taking content, verbatim, from the sites of other, more established VA’s. And when confronted, some of these people actually have the audacity to deny stealing content or worse, ask the VA from whom they stole to outsource to them!

That takes balls!

So how can you protect your own content?

First, go to www.copyscape.com and run a search. Their engine will scan your copy and compare it against copy found on other sites. Take note of the URL’s in question and contact the owner of the site. Ask them to remove the offending copy and give them a deadline.

Follow-up to make sure that the copy has been removed.

If there is no contact info, get in touch with the hosting company for the site (by doing a whois search at www.whois.net) and ask them to take the site down.

Second, if you have images you don’t want copied, grab a javascript from Hypergurl for a static site and from www.techmixer.com for a Hotlink plugin for WordPress powered sites.

Third, be vigilant and let others know that you are.