Tips to Help Copy-Protect Your Content

Due to the increase in content piracy, I have decided to do some research and put together some resources which you can use to help prevent this from occurring. The information presented here is for your benefit to use or not, as you desire. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have or if you know of any other ideas I may have left out. The resources mentioned will not stop the die-hard pirates, but it should curb the novices and give them pause to think.

As I was prowling around the web, I discovered that the most popular first line of defense is to get your content copy protected. Now, there are two services which stood out to me and they are: Copyscape and My Free Copyright.


• With Copyscape, you place a badge on your site notifying everyone that your content is protected. You can also input your URL and they will look up the first 10 instances of duplicate content from your site. For a more detailed report, you will need to pay $0.05 per search. There is also the option of signing up for their copysentry program for $4.95 per month. This service will inform you if any duplicate content shows up on the web. copysentry


• You may also want to put a badge on each of your individual posts.


• The other service is called MyFreeCopyright.com This service provides an actual copyright of your original content. They provide you with a logo to place on your site. This logo directs your visitor to your copyright registration page, which provides proof of your copyright. You can swing by their site and view the FAQ's, as they can answer any questions you may have. This is also a free service.


• You can license your work through Creative Commons. You can choose how you wish to share your content and then place a badge on your site which will denote the restrictions, if any, you place on sharing your work.


• You may wish to choose to place a watermark on your photos and images. Many photo software programs offer this feature, including the one I have started to use: Picasa. Yes, it is free (do you sense a theme here?) and very easy to use.


• I have tried to find a way to add a watermark to my posts, but it will only work on the original; once copied, the watermark disappears, which kind of defeats the purpose.


• You can also put a copyright on your feed. If you use Feedburner, you can follow the link for the instructions.



• If you use Wordpress., they have a plugin available for you.



Stepping it up a notch...


• There is a feature that you MAY want to try and that is disabling the right-click function on your page. This would prevent the casual pirate from copying and pasting your text or images. You can get the code at dynamicdrive.com. You then paste the code in the "body" section of your HTML code. For those that use Blogspot, you will need to go to your Layout page, click "add gadget", click "add HTML/Java", paste the code and hit "save."


• If you have a Wordpress blog, they already have a plugin for this feature. Click here, for the information and download.


• If you wish to have everything protected, including your coding, you can investigate HTML Protector.


The Pirates Have Attacked...

Okay, it has happened and something needs to be done to protect your property, so what do you do?


• The first thing you should do is contact the pirate and let them know that you want them to stop. I have included a cease and desist letter that I found at PlagiarismToday.com (or use one of your own), that you can send to them. Just fill in the relevant information on the letter and you are ready to go. Obviously, feel free to copy it off my site. Also, be sure that you have already copyrighted your work or you have proof that it is yours, as some of these thugs could actually turn around and sue you, claiming that the work they stole from you, is actually theirs (I found this out today).


• If they still refuse to comply, then you can contact their web host, if it is a Blogspot blog, just go to the navigation bar at the top of the page and click the "flag" button and follow the instructions.


• Contact the search engines and inform them.


• Here is the Google form for you. They suggest you fax it for faster service.


• If you really want to sock-it-to-them, contact their advertisers (let's face it, these "people" are in it for the money, so you might as well hit them where they live) and let them know that one of their affiliates has committed plagiarism. Since this is against most company's TOS, they will more than likely pull the plug on them.

I hope that this has been of assistance to you.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.