14 January 2009

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.


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

15 comments:

  1. Thanks for the all-in-1 resource on this topic! It made for interesting reading. So far I've not been plagiariased, as far as I and the free copyscape know, anyway :)

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  2. Hi Tim,

    I see now you are going hard against pirates. It happened to me once, some guy copy it my Landing page, it were a Squeeze sort of page, but the guy did it including my own photo and my signature. I see him in my stats from my hosting and just click it and see myself promoting another business I didnt knew about.
    I tried to contact him but he didnt reply me so I contact it his free hosting webmaster and told him about it and if he could please delete that. No body asnwered me, but some days after that he change the page and finally he remove my face and my signature from his site.

    What about a cheap pirate, huh?

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  3. *Lynne*: You are welcome. As far as I know, it hasn't happened to me yet, but who knows;-)

    Marketing Business Review: Yeah, there have been several instances with some EntreCard members over the past few weeks, and I figured I might as well see if I can scratch together some info for them and anyone else who may be able to use it. I'm glad that you were able to resolve your issue. That is unbelievable that he would use your signature and picture.

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  4. Thanks for all of these very helpful tips. I knew about a couple of them, but not all of those. Wow, you really did your homework :-) Great post!

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  5. Thanks! These are all great things to know about. I will use your link to get that cease and desist letter, and also will begin copyrighting my stuff. I always thought that you had a "natural" copyright once you posted something on the web. I read that somewhere. But actually, physically doing it sounds better.
    I will also use that disable right click feature. This is all a lot of work, but I know that it's worth it.

    I appreciate all the tips.
    Great post!

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  6. This is great information but it sure sounds like a nuisance. I'd like to share some of this in my Friday "Things I Learned This Week" post with a link back to this post at www.zemeks.blogspot.com if it's okay with you.

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  7. Dori: You're welcome. Yeah, it was a lot of work, but I hope it proves helpful:)

    The Fitness Diva: I'm glad that you were able to find this helpful. If there is anymore that I can do, please let me know.

    Karen, author of "My Funny Dad, Harry": I know, it's a lot of work, but hopefully it is worth the effort. Thank you, that sounds like a great idea!

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  8. Very informative and helpful! Thanks for gathering all the info together.

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  9. Lux: You're welcome, I'm glad it was helpful:)

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  10. hello there! great post! i surely needed this one. thanks for posting this up! ;)

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  11. blanne: You are very welcome. I'm glad that I could be of help;)

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  12. This is great information! Thank you for sharing!

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  13. BeadedTail: You're welcome;-)

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  14. Thanx you veery much i do that right now :)

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  15. Nice Post
    Blog Walking
    http://articleniche.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete

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