There are a number of tools you can use to find anybody copying your identity or your work or which can be used to help prevent theft:
- Google Alerts will search for any term you give it and email you a report every day on what it finds on the Internet.
- Both Boardreader and Boardtracker will search Internet bulletin boards and forums for any term you enter and provide a report with links to the relevant postings.
- Copyscape will look for copies of your webpages on the Internet. It can also be used to monitor the Internet regularly for plagiarism through its Copysentry service.
- Tineye is a reverse image search tool currently in beta – give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the Internet.
- The Google Advanced Image Search will search for images using any terms you give it including your own image file names.
- Either Picture-shark or Watermark.ws can be used to watermark images for online use.
- The Digital Fingerprint plugin for WordPress can be used to add a unique ID as a tag to the end of every post in your RSS feed. It also offers tools to help you search for that ID on the Internet or you can use Google Alerts (see above). Copyfeed also does a similar job for WordPress users.
- The Bad Behavior script tool can be used to stop some forms of automated content theft from your website.
- There are various facilities online for searching domain names you can use to check if someone has registered an imitation of your domain name/trade mark and, if so, who. We have a domain name WhoIs search tool available here and, for example, namedroppers.com can search for any domain names containing defined keywords, although it is limited to gTLD’s and .us.
- You can use yell.com to check if there are any businesses with the same or very similar name elsewhere in the country. The Companies House Webcheck service can also be used to check limited companies in the UK, and an ICC database search will find both registered and unregistered companies in the UK and Ireland.
- The WaybackMachine at archive.org can be used to find copies of web pages as they used to exist, even if the current version has been changed or removed. It can also be used to find copies of your own web pages as historical evidence to help prove copyright, unregistered design right, and first usage of a trade mark.
Please note that we do not endorse any of the above as we merely offer them here as tools which we hope may help.
