How to protect your content

We’ve had a problem for the last couple of years. Lots of people apparently love our content so much that they choose to use it on their own websites. None of them ask us first, or give us credit, but they post it as their own.

It’s frustrating.

It was a year or so ago that I first discovered this. Someone on Twitter was ranting about how someone stole all their content, and images, and was using it on their website. They had discovered this by using Copyscape. So at the time, I popped in my URL and got something like 29 results. That’s not a small number. That’s a lot of websites using either our exact copy or a copy with minor changes.

It’s irritating, because content is king. The reason we do so well in Google is because we write a lot. When you’ve spent almost three straight years blogging on a regular basis, to find other people using your content is upsetting.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Maybe. But duplicate content can negatively affect your Google ranking, and we’ve worked really hard to be where we are now. Having that jeopardized because someone else liked the content too isn’t a compliment.

This year when we redid our website and added our video, we rewrote most of our content so it would again be original. But it’s still being copied.

And there’s little I can do about it. Last time, I got upset, requested they all remove our content. At least two said they hired a copywriter to write it for them and the copywriter plagiarized it, but the majority of the responses were from people who claimed to have written it themselves. I find it interesting that so many people wrote identical content to each other, let alone that it was identical to what I wrote.

So I stopped looking. Because ultimately, there’s little I can do. I can file a claim with Google to get their listing removed, if I can prove it’s my content. I can approach them and ask they change it, and sometimes that’ll work and sometimes they’ll fight. Yes, my husband is an attorney but if the culprit isn’t in my state, there’s not a lot he can do for me. I figured I’d stop looking to save myself the frustration and irritation of so many copyright violations.

Then last week, I was alerted by a good samaritan that another website, for a web developer, had posted many of our blog posts as their own. I took a look, and indeed, there were four of our blog posts, word for word, on that website. Including images that I personally made. One of them with a screen cap of a listing for a client’s website. Worse, the images were hot linked, so if you looked at the source code you could literally see our website URL. It was frustrating to see that the images we made were being used elsewhere, but also we pay for the stock photos we use on our site. Someone stealing content with a stock photo we paid for is not just stealing from us, but from the stock photo company as well.

This was unbelievable to me. Yes, you might hire someone to write a few paragraphs for your homepage and receive stolen content (please stop buying $5 copy) but you don’t accidentally have four lengthy blog posts word for word on your site by accident with the same images. That’s just outrageous.

What can you do to prevent theft?

This is, of course, the big question. How do we stop it? How do you protect your content?

1. Put a copyright notice on your site. Seems silly and obvious to me, that you would need to tell people not to copy your content, but I do believe that some people just don’t understand that it’s stealing.
2. Turn off hot linking. If someone wants to really take your images, they can, but if you don’t allow hot linking then they can’t just copy and paste in your images.
3. Watermark your images. This isn’t one of my favorites, because I choose or create images for specific reasons and I don’t want my logo superimposed on it to be a distraction. But if you are a photographer or want to protect your images, this works.
4. Use a plugin that disables text from being highlighted or copied and pasted, like WP-Copyprotect. I’ve considered this, but I like the idea that someone can share and quote what I wrote, with proper attribution. But it’s something to consider down the road if this continues to be a problem for us.

What can you do after it’s stolen?

1. You can contact the website owner. In my experience, this can have mixed results. Either they will remove it or they won’t or they’ll say they wrote it first. Even if you can use the Wayback Machine to prove you had it first, many will still fight you. But it’s sometimes a quick way to resolve the issue.
2. File a DMCA claim with Google. These can be tricky, I’ve done a number of them. Google wants you to really prove you own the content, and sometimes it’s your word against theirs.  It is satisfying when Google removes a site from their index, but it doesn’t stop the offender from using your content. I’m not even sure they know they’ve been delisted.
3. Contact their web host. If you can find their web host, you can often make contact and alert them that your copyright is being infringed upon, and they can suspend the entire website until it’s resolved.
4. Sue for copyright infringement. This is hard and expensive, particularly if you are in different parts of the country. Even with a lawyer at my disposal this is unrealistic on most cases.

Ultimately, after this latest incident, I signed up with DMCA.com to start monitoring my content and put a small badge on my blog posts alerting readers that the posts are protected. It’s small, and probably won’t make much difference. But it’s something.