Protecting Your Site’s Content from Plagiarism
Good luck with this one. Really. I mean it.
The advent of digital information has created a plethora of opportunities to rip off other people’s content because, after all, content is king. You can right click and save a graphic. You can cut and paste a bunch of text, and republish it somewhere else. Stealing information has never, ever been quite so effortless as it is now – if you have an RSS Feed on your blog, you can even automate the stealing of your content for the plagiarist.
There is no real awesome automated way to protect your content. Forget the “no right click” JavaScript as that is, and has been, a bit of a joke since JavaScript can be turned off by plagiarists, and it just frustrates the visitors that want to share a snippet of your content and point to your page in any one of the 100 social media sites – visitors that likely won’t bother turning off their JavaScript just to do it.
Protecting your images? Well, if the browser can see ‘em, they’re already on the users hard drive. That’s how browsers work. You can watermark them but then it ruins the presentation of the image.
Your music? Countless audio programs can record whatever sound players on people’s computer, save it, and turn it into an MP3. Many of them are free. So even if they can’t get to the file, they can make their own.
There are some services you can use to try and keep the thefts to a minimum, and we’ll go over a few of them here.
Protecting Your Words
For writers, bloggers, and businesses, their words are their creditability currency on the internet and in many cases, writers are required to submit only original content to places that pay them for that writing. When it’s your own blog, it is just as important – especially if you are serving ads to pay the hosting bills or using the blog to drive traffic to your own store.
So, your first mission is to find your words on the Internet, and see if they are in any other places that you didn’t put them. The easiest (and free) way is to pick a particular phrase you wrote that’s fairly unique in the article, and just Google it.
If you don’t have the time to set aside once a week and check, you can use Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com/). Copyscape has several levels of services, the lowest being absolutely free, and the highest being a recurring monthly fee.
If you input your URL in the field (the specific page you want to check – putting your main URL in won’t check your whole site), Copyscape will present you with a list of sites that may have take your content. Once you click and take a look, they will even let you know in the top frame if the info has recently been removed, and will provide you a link to
http://www.copyscape.com/respond.php
which gives you excellent steps to take regarding responding to a site that may have plagiarized your work.
Copyscape also has a premium service for $.05 a search that allows you to check content before publishing (which is useful of you have others writing for your blog and you want to make sure they didn’t plagiarize), and Copysentry, a service starting at $4.95 a month that automatically monitors the web for copies of your pages, emailing you as soon as they appear.
You should also include a warning in your RSS Feed and in each post that if people are viewing the content on a site not your own, the information has been plagiarized.
Protecting Your Images
This is also tough, though there are some tricks that you can use that won’t totally thwart a thief, but will make it harder for them to grab your image.
One of the main places people snag images nowadays is at http://images.google.com, which is Google’s image search engine. An easy way to keep Google out of your site and your images off their image search engine is with a robots.txt file. Create an ascii file, and if all your images are in the /images, directory, simply add
User-Agent: * Disallow: /images/
to the file, and then upload it to the same directory as your index file. This will at least make your images more difficult to find.
You can also “shrink-wrap” or “cloak” the image – place a transparent image over your image to that when someone clicks to save it, all they get is a blank image. There’s a write up of it here along with an image and table generator.
And, of course, there’s watermarking. You don’t need any special software to do this if you can manipulate an image. Simply place a semi-transparent line of text in the middle of the image, making it useless for anyone else.
Protecting Your Audio and Video
Almost anything we tell you here can be navigated around and folks grabbing this stuff likely know all the tricks. Google “how to copyright protect music files” and “how to crack copyright protected music files” and you will see what we mean.
Using flash/FLV players instead of directly handing off the downloading of the music or video file is a good bump to make people have to try and get over to steal your stuff. There are so many, though, and so many various plugins for various sites that it would be folly for us to try and name just one.
Another infringement search service for videos and music is http://www.mimtid.net/. The search is free, and for $49.95, you will be given access to their DMCA Takedown system that allows you to submit Takedown notices with ease.
Alternative Copyright Protection?
There are a number of places, including http://myfreecopyright.com/, that allow you to “register” your copyright, even though its not registered with anyone but them. An attorney that specializes in the needs of photographers said not so fast with the legal claims in a blog post on the service.
While these are little tips and tricks you can use, obviously, if your content is extremely valuable, you’ll want to see an intellectual properties attorney regarding what steps you need to take to protect yourself, or properly register the copyright yourself according to your country’s legal requirements.
Tags: copyright, plagiarism, theft
Good info, thanks. I've also used the TinEye search engine to search for copies of my images with some success, even discovered a band that was selling CDs with my image on their cover.
The attorney linked is correct that you need to register your copyright with the federal government to file a legal case, but for most of us, if you have to file a lawsuit you've already lost, lawsuits are simply too expensive for the average content creator.
Copyright claims are handled in federal court, and there's no such thing as a federal small claims court. As such, you're looking at putting in quite a bit of money up-front if you want to prosecute such claims. For most content creators, there is no effective recourse in the law for copyright infringement, with one exception.
One, almost nuclear-strength exception. The controversial and IMHO overly-broad DMCA does provide a tool that can be used to at least force the removal of stolen content from US-hosted web sites, and which doesn't require a lawyer, the DMCA takedown notice. After two weeks of the record label and band ignoring my calls, letters and emails, I sent a takedown notice to Amazon.com for the image of their album cover. 15 minutes later, we were talking, and the issue was quickly resolved. The DMCA is a ugly big hammer, and I hate to recommend it, but sadly, it is the *only* hammer most content creators can afford to wield.
Joe Decker on February 17th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
I didn't know about http://www.tineye.com/ – that's an awesome service.
IMO, the DMCA, if used correctly, is an awesome tool because while its technically a nuclear option, it does allow the person who has the DMCA complaint to counterfile just as easily as the original DMCA complaint is filed.
Once that happens, its all going to court, or its over. The problems with the DMCA come up when its abused – people filing when its BS, hosts and sites over-reaching beyond what's required and terminating accounts in a knee jerk reaction (we have a post coming up on the Google musicblogocide in a few days), or people who are complained against not being given the information that they have a right to counterfile.
Jen Lepp on February 17th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
[...] you are still concerned about theft of your content, Jen over at DrakNet wrote a nice article on Protecting Your Site’s Content from Plagiarism. She lists a number of tools for tracking your content’s use on the [...]
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