Copyright issues with content on the internet are always something to think about, especially if you’re blogging and adding content on a regular basis. At some point, people WILL take your content and reuse it, it’s just a matter of time. Even if they are posting an author statement showing you as the author with a link back to your website, it’s still a violation of copyrights, if they don’t have your permission to do so.
The duplicate content issue is also another factor to take into consideration. If you post your content on other sites as well as your own, be careful about how you do this, to avoid penalties from Google.
ProBlogger published a great article this morning with more information on how to protect your content. They also suggest ways to protect your RSS feeds, since those can be scraped by people who aren’t creative enough to come up with their own great ideas.
The article mentions watermarking your images as well, so that if someone does manage to get one, it makes it very difficult for the image to be used in any other situation. Read my blog post about adding a watermark to your images, for additional tips on this as well.
If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins you can use to prevent text selection and right clicking, which are mentioned in the article. If you’re not using WordPress, you can add scripts in the head section of your code to disable text selection and right clicking on images as well. These scripts are available from Dynamic Drive, you can click on the links provided below to grab them and implement them on your site.
Disable right clicking (great for protecting images)
Have you had issues with people plagiarizing your content? If so, what you have done about it, if anything? Leave a comment below to let us know how you’ve handled it, we can all use more ideas to help deal with this growing problem.
