Website Plagiarism Detector

[jujubee]

I thought this was a pretty cool website:

http://www.copyscape.com

I already found 5 people copying mine and sent them off friendly letters asking them to cease.

[jujubee]

I should add to Flipside if you're out there, one of the websites looked like a cross between yours and mine (at least reminded me of yours to a degree):

http://suburbanartworks.com/arch/

I've also received two incorrect replies back so far lol:

I’m sorry but all of our material is original and rendered in house. We hardly have any text on our site too, only in 3 places and it was all handwritten by us. If you can please be specific to the particular rendering I can produce the contract for the job as proof as necessary. The links you sent us don’t show me anything.

and...:

What Copyright Infringement? If changing a couple if words on our website will make you happy, I will change them.

Some people just don't understand what caching is...

[Morne]

so when you say you already found 5 people, do you mean they stole images from your site, or their site looks like yours?

also, what you mean by "Some people just don't understand what caching is..."?

[pskdude]

whoa this is freaky i cant believe people would do this.

[Neilg]

Hahaha, there's loads between these:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/

http://www.cgfocus.com/forums/

[Shimakaze]

It refers to the design of the sites itself. It's almost impossible to make a website without it looking like one of the billions of other sites on the net, but that Copyscape website notices when the code is identical.
Cached means the website is stored even after it's been changed. for instance http://www.archive.org/web/web.php can be used to look up old versions of websites. as can Google search results and so on.

Hahaha, there's loads between these:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/
http://www.cgfocus.com/forums/

Don't they just both use the same open source forum engine?

I don't really think it's anything wrong with beginners looking at how professional websites are built up to learn how to make their own sites, and if their sites end up looking a bit like their inspiration then that's fine. That's how all forms of art works. Just as long as it isn't identical.

[instinct]

It isnt referring to the look or the forum itself in this case but the forum names...they are plain taken over from cgtalk (and way overkill given the amount of users :P )

Regards,
Thorsten

[Neilg]

Don't they just both use the same open source forum engine?

They do, but look at the sub-forum descriptions and orders. Theyve changed a couple, but it's mostly a copy & paste.

e:f,b

[Shimakaze]

That's what I would call "inspiration". Not close enough for a cease and desist at least.
If the sites were direct competitors on the same level it would be more of an issue but then it wouldn't have happened in the first place.
As it is now it's more like "awwww look a them trying to be like CGSociety! So cuuuuuuute!"

[jujubee]

Well, I spent a long time working on my website and it is very unique. It also ranks very high in search engines so I got quite a few people copying mostly the code. Most people are kind enough to change their pages around a lot afterwards and I don't mind that.

But with this site, I can trace similar code and have found lines in all those sites which were taken exactly word for word. I spent a lot of time coding by hand and I know when a very strange sequence of words matches 100%. All of my words are very intentional.

There were a few sites which were nearly identical in layout and navigation but they 'looked' altered.

There were a couple that looked almost exactly like mine.

Then there were a few that just had words/syntax copied.

I don't mind copying so much, but one problem you face at higher Google rankings is that when Google sees 'duplicate' copies of your website on the Internet, Google can punish your ranking and bring you down because the search engine sees these 'copies' as spam. Google punishment is the main reason why I would be concerned.