How To Protect Content Theft Online
Contrary to what many people think, creating web content is hard work. Creating quality content takes a lot of time, research, planning, organizing, brainstorming, and editing. Depending on the length of your content, it could really be a time-consuming process. That’s why it’s so frustrating and heartbreaking when you find out that someone has stolen your work without your permission and without giving you any credit.
Even worse, most of the time you don’t even know that someone has copied your work. Plus, if you’re constantly having to research, plan, organize, brainstorm and edit, how can you possibly keep up? Well, it’s definitely hard, but not impossible. Let’s take a look at some methods that will help you can keep up with the theft of your content and even have it taken down if needed.
Copyright Your Work
According to About.com, “a copyright is a form of intellectual property law which protects original works of authorship [...]. Copyright law does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed.”
Obtaining a copyright for your work will take some time and it can be a lengthy process; plus it’s not free and can end up being quite expensive (depending on your country and circumstance). There are copyright rules and regulations for each country, so you’ll really need to do your research before taking this route. Make sure to go over the copyright laws and use the appropriate website for your country.
While your work is actually copyrighted the moment you create and publish it on the web, an actual copyright registration is always better and serves as legal proof whenever a problem arises.
Obtain a License
I’m sure you’ve heard of Creative Commons license, especially for images. It a free copyright license that lets you set the rights for how other people can use your work. You will of course keep your copyright, but it gives others the ability to use and distribute your work as defined by you. As you can see from the different types below, a Creative Commons license can go from one extreme to the other.
The 6 different types of licenses:
- Attribution – others can use and edit your work (even commercially) as long as they give you credit.
- Attribution Share Alike – others can use and edit your work (even commercially) as long as they give you credit and license their new creation using the same terms as yours.
- Attribution-NoDerivs – others can use you work (even commercially), but cannot edit it and must give you credit.
- Attribution-NonCommercial – others can use and edit your work (non-commercially only) as long as they give you credit, but they do not have to license their creation under the same terms as yours.
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike – others can use and edit your work (non-commercially only) as long as give you credit and license their creation under the same terms as yours.
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs – others can use your work (non-commercially only), but cannot edit it and must give you credit.
It’s pretty easy to select a license for your content, plus they’ll give you an HTML code so that you can add the license information to your website or blog for all to see.
DMCA Protection Badge
DMCA offers another free alternative to protecting the content on your site. “The DMCA.com Protection Badge guarantees that online criminals and content thieves hesitate before copying your original material.” It’s as simple as registering and then adding a badge to your website or blog. They have 50+ badge designs to choose from and your protection includes page tracking and monitoring, plus 1 free DMCA Takedown per year. You can also build your own badge and even add a watermark to all of your images.
Check for Plagiarism
There are various duplicate checking websites that can quickly search for copies of your content on the web. For most of them, you either enter the URL of your content or copy and paste the text to start a search.
Check for duplicate content using these sites:
With most tools like this you have to manually search on a regular basis, but CopyGator (listed above) will continually monitor your content and alert you whenever it’s copied. So it’s definitely a good idea to sign up for that service.
Final Thoughts
Don’t let content thieves get away. While it’s tempting to just ignore it and move on instead of going through a lengthy process of remove, this could actually cause even more problems for you. Even though you’re the originator of the content, you could get penalized by search engines for having duplicate content. If it keeps happening, your website can even get banned from search engines altogether, which will also hurt your rankings and traffic.
So it’s really important to keep up with your content and make sure you take action when you find out that it has been copied. Unfortunately, playing the “nice guy” won’t get you anywhere when it comes to content theft. So never be afraid to stand up for what’s yours.
This blog post was written Lior Levin who is an advisor to a live chat customer support software called iAdvize and Lior also works with 123 neon signs, a neon signs store that sells neon and LED signs online
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Category: Blogging, Writing Tips
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Kori is the editor and owner of Netchunks, a premier blog about Webmaster and Blogging Tips. She intends to make the web a friendlier place by sharing info and articles which will help other webmasters and bloggers to become successful online.Subscribe
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What ever we do, there are peoples always try to copy our work… we can’t stop them, even if we stop, then within somedays someone will do this… so i generally won’t care about this… let them copy… google knows who has original article…
Asho recently posted..CDBurnerXP
yes, I also found my 5 articles copied by hamhit.com and I asked them to remove once, then left it like that, knowing, they will be penalized by the Google and still they are not getting any traffic.
Twitter: Jajodia_Saket
says:
Its not always like that sometime Google even give copied content higher rank then orignal one.. So its batr to get your content removed from other websites..
Saket Jajodia recently posted..Ge.tt Makes Sharing Files Extrimly Easy And Fast In Real-Time
This is a must have “Alert” to all bloggers.
You can try some DHTML scripts that prevent content theft…
James recently posted..pennzoil oil change coupons
Twitter: sureshpeterss
says:
Really shiva its an awesome post
a great guide given, we have to protect our content . Thanks a lot lot once again
sureshpeters recently posted..How To Increase WordPress Loading Speed With Ajax Pagination
Great work Shiva…I have been facing a lot of trouble in keeping a check on plagiarism and duplicacy…..Thnks once again
Aditya recently posted..Top 10 Most Influential People Online
I think this is very important, many black hat SEOs are scraping content from other websites. Right now after Panda update those websites does not appear in top results, but they steal content.
I think that copyright is very complicated and licesense is not a way out, but using special software with watermarks can be a way out as a thief has no chance to use it.
Shiva great information, will look into putting higher copy writing standards on the sites I have. Sometimes people think they can have free rein with the things you’ve worked hard for.
Twitter: ifhamkhan
says:
As the discussion is of copyright of content I am already using a copyright program as it is not comprise with any legal juridicstion but can really help.you a lot to claim your content well the program is mycopyright.com hope you too start using it.
Twitter: Mazzastick
says:
I was on a forum once and this girl was complaining about how someone stole not only her content but her website too.
It was crazy, she lived in New Zealand and the guy lived in the States. She was able to find out the guy that did it and contacted him several times.
I believe that she wound up contacting his hosting service and had his site pulled.
Justin recently posted..Make Money Online Through Blogging
Another great post Shiva.Thanks for sharing the name of duplicate content checking websites.Except copyscape all are new new to me.
I’ve read similar stories of theft content and this is something so unprofessional. I think its a good idea to get a copyright but still, I don’t think it completely arms us. It’d be annoying to request the offender to place the link of the original author. Best, I guess is to submit some paper works and request the hosting service of the offender to pull down the duplicate work.
Content theft happens a lot, especially by new webmasters that are not aware that Google will know they have duplicate content. Regardless, it creates a lot of problems for the original author. I regularly use Copyscape to know when someone has stolen my content.
Twitter: finallyfast
says:
Excellent tips. I’ve been fortunate not to run into problems like this before; however I’ve heard some REAL horror stories of people’s content literally being lifted from them entirely and propped up on some weird robot spam site. Spooky stuff. There are a lot of less-than trustworthy people out to make a quick buck unfortunately….
greg recently posted..Beat the heat with a DIY AC…all you need is a fan and styrofoam cooler http://ow.ly/5oVYD
Thank you so much for your helpful tips as this might happen to me one day, now I know how to protect it!
there is a plugin called copyright in wordpresss that disabled text selection on browsers . its of some help
Iphone 4 jailbreak recently posted..Chinese Teen Offers Virginity for iPhone 4
Really helpful stuff.
Thanks for sharing such a great tips.
iPhone Application Developer
Thanks, Shiva. I think that copywriting is not fair and should be prosecuted by the law. Once I had a guest post in one of my blogs and when I published it, a friend of my (a co-owner of the blog) said that the content in this post was not original. now I check all the posts at all sites mentioned ny you, just to be on the safe side.
Really great info. I have had some issues with content theft in the past and I will definitely implement some of these. I really need to get on the creative commons licence.
Corey recently posted..Google Changed the Game…Again
There are lots of things that you can do to protect your content. But if you want to know if its been copied then you can go to Copyscape, duplicker and plagiarisma since these services check whether your content has been copied from anywhere on Internet or not. Aside from that they provide you badges to show on your Website that your content is protected and free from plagiarism.
I have had some of my content being copied several times. In all cases the problem was fixed by contacting the person who copied my content or by reporting them to Google. I guess I got lucky.
Cristian recently posted..69 sexy things I learned about blogging in 2 years
I like the idea about DMCA protection. Also so far I have been using another simple method – I just copied a part of the text which I wanted to check and pasted it in Google. If I found coincidence – the content is not original.
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Nice and informative post about protection our contents, but I think copyright facility could not much effective as most of the net surfers try to use the contents of other even by re-write them.
Prince recently posted..Dubai Airport
What can you do when you find out that your content has been stealed?. I mean, you can send an email to site’s owner telling him to remove your content, but what if you don’t get a reply?
content theft is really a burning issue and we cannot avoid it there are lots of people who try to cheat and copy from other websites easily and i think the above mentioned tips are really helpful to many extent..thanks for the share!
Copying others work is a heinous crime and it is indeed very rampant practices on the web so it is better to use that kind of software to protect our website from the theft.
Being able to protect your own work online is definitely one of the most important things around. This is a great article, I really wondered why nobody opened this subject earlier. I know Google downgrades people who plagiarize and kills their traffic but I still hope they keep inventing new ways to make the originals much more visible than articles and products that were stolen.
Nice tool sure comes in handy like if you have images you made and put a lot of time in it and you see somebody randomly using it for him self