Myth No. 3: You Can’t Copyright Words.
Legal Truth: Actually, you can. I once encountered three websites that had stolen, nearly verbatim, a single page of my website. After a brief fight, two of those pages were taken down. The other page never made it to publication because the copywriter who was asked to “polish” my stolen content by his client said, “Hey, I know this writer. You can’t use this.” (Thankfully, he had contacted me and let me know—I’m forever grateful.)
“People may be confused here because they've heard you can’t copyright facts or ideas. This is true. But one’s expression of those facts and ideas is protected," Kousenis says. "When it comes to written expression, copyright infringement is determined by a measure of substantial similarity.” That means if you compare two pages—the copyrighted, original work and the potentially offending work side by side—they need to be substantially different in order to avoid copyright infringement. Even if you paraphrase, and change some words and the order of sentences, you can still be found guilty of copyright infringement and assessed the penalties you see cited below in Myth No. 5.
Your best bet? Write your own stuff from scratch or hire someone to do it for you, if you’re not so great with words.