What Should You Do When You Find an Infringement (Part One)
Whether you are a creator who is discovering their first infringement or a grizzled veteran who has faced countless misuses of their work, knowing how to respond to infringement is crucial in order to respond to them effectively.
This is especially difficult for those dealing with their first infringements. For many creators, the first time they discover an infringement of their work is often a difficult one, especially if it’s also a plagiarism.
Realizing that others are misusing your work can feel like a personal assault. Not only does it show carelessness to something you worked a great deal on, but most creators feel a personal connection to their work, as if it is an extension of themselves.
These emotions can make it very difficult to form an effective response.
But even for those with a great deal of experience dealing with infringements, it’s still worthwhile to evaluate and make sure that the approach you are taking is the best one.
To that end, here’s a rundown of what you should do when you find an infringement of your work.
Step 1: Keep Calm
For those who are new to dealing with infringements or are facing a particularly egregious infringement, this can be the most important step.
It may be tempting to fire off angry emails, post about the infringement on social media or start making threats. While all of these temptations are understandable, they usually do more to make the situation worse rather than make it better.
Taking a few moments to breathe and clear your head will not make the infringement significantly worse, but reacting out of anger may. If you find that you’re upset, take a moment to calm down before moving on.
Step 2: Investigate the Infringement
If the nature of the infringement is already very familiar to you, this may not be a necessary step. However, if it’s not, it’s important to take a moment to understand exactly what is going on with the infringement.
To that end, here are some of the questions you should strive to answer:
- Who is committing the infringement?
- Who might I go to about stopping the infringement (web host, online retailer, etc.)?
- Is the infringement commercial or noncommercial in nature?
- What country does the infringer appear to be from?
- Are there other works of mine being infringed?
To do that, it’s important to not just look at the site and the infringement, but also research it some behind the scenes. You can use tools such as Domain Tools to help see where a site is hosted and maybe learn more about the people behind it.
Any information you find, be sure to document it. To this end Google Docs can be an invaluable tool, letting you add information to a spreadsheet or a word processor document from anywhere on any device.
Step 3: Preserve Evidence
Before taking any action against the infringement, be sure to take a few minutes to preserve the evidence.
Take screenshots of anything that contains your work. You can trivially get a screenshot with your computer or you can use Chrome extensions such as FireShot to help grab the full page. The latest versions of Firefox can also do this without an extension.
Alternatively, you can use WebCite to save an archived copy of the page if it’s public.
It’s important to do this fairly quickly because sites with multiple infringements have a tendency to be unreliable and, even on mainstream sites can remove listings and accounts that are engaging in rampant infringement.
Before doing anything it’s important to document the infringement so you can see how the content on the page changes as you begin to take action.
As for what exact actions you can and should take, we’ll be covering that in part two, coming shortly.
