Copyscape is a search engine, with a little different purpose. It finds the web pages which has copies of your content. It is a very creative idea, where you type in the URL of your website or page whose content you want to check in internet. Once you hit the Go button, Copyscape will return the pages in internet which has parts your content. Parts of content means even small paragraphs or phrases of your content. Though Copyscape only finds the text duplicates and not other media like images or sounds, this itself is very useful. Consider, a person sits down and writes an online tutorial for some new tool, and hopes to earn small pennies with ads and banners. But, without his knowledge someone else might have been using this content to boost his own revenues, with the original content maker not even aware of this. This is where we can use Copyscape to detect the plagiarists.
The free and open version gives you only the top ten results, and you need to sign up for a premium account to get all the results. Also, for the premium crowd, copyscape provides tools like Copysentry, which will monitor your web content continuously and reports every new duplicate that sprout in the internet. Another premium tool is where you can copy-paste your offline content and check if it is there in internet. Already many lawsuits have been filed against plagiarists with the help of the Copyscape tool (according to Wikipedia), including the one by a small CSS tutorial Author, who sued Apple for copying his content.
How does it work? Copyscape uses Google APIs to do the job, along with their own proprietary algorithm to exactly pinpoint copies. The site owned by a company called Indigo Stream Technologies, Ltd. and was launched in 2004.
The low points being that it cannot detect other media plagiarism except textual content. Also, it cannot tell which is the original copy and which is the duplicate, and that most professional tools will cost you. Anyways, for bloggers and other people who use internet as a writing medium, Copyscape is a tool to bookmark. They also provide a banner to post in websites showing “Page protected by Copyscape, do not copy”.
Copyscape Forum discussing on IP rights.
