How To Protect Your Website Content

Most of the webmasters put in a great deal of energy and time in developing quality content for their web site. But they are not aware of thousands of other webmasters who are using content from their web sites without permission. The problem of online copyright infringement is a growing phenomenon. The ease and extent of infringement is greatly facilitated by the nature of web. Webmasters can use the major search engines to check whether someone has stolen content from their site. For each search, they should carefully review the first two results pages. Here, we discuss some of the measures to safeguard your web content:


1. Place a Copyright Remark
You must demonstrate your copyright notice on each page of your web site. This notice should have the year of publication and also the name of your firm. This information could also be displayed in a graphic pasted in the footer of the page, eg.

© 2000-2004, Active Venture Pte Ltd. All rights reserved.

2. Register with the U.S. Copyright Office
You may also register your web site with the U.S. Copyright Office. Even if you don't register, still you will get protection, but in that case you will have to collect evidence against the content thief. You have to register your site with the U.S. Copyright Office within three months of its launch.

3. Action to be taken against online thieves
You should send them a strong mail telling them to stop their copyright infringement activities. If they continue to violate copyright, send a mail to their ISP, credit card company, webhosting company, and the domain name registrar. If nothing happens even after you have taken these steps, contact your lawyer for further advice to take legal action against the culprits.


Apart from the above mentioned measures, there are some simple tricks to prevent online thieves from lifting content from your web site:

1. Disable right click
You can use JavaScript to disable the right click of your mouse. But this method can be annoying for the sincere visitors to your site.

2. Software security
There are several softwares to prevent users from seeing your source code. These softwares invoke a JavaScript function 'unescape' which 'encodes' the HTML coding into a long series of characters. However, it can still be easily decoded to HTML using another function of JavaScript.

3. Use PDF files.
More usage of password-protected PDF files would prevent people from blatant copy and paste of your web content. Although the more experienced thieves could make use of several password recovery softwares available to break through the protected PDFs and copy the content.

4. Conversion of text to images
This solution takes a lot of time and the size of pages also get increased but is a fool-proof solution for copy-paste problem. But if someone is determined on lifting content from your site, then no one can stop him from re-typing the content.

5. Using Java/Flash
If your images are embedded in Java Applets or Flash, it is very difficult for online thieves to copy them. Here again, the more experienced thieves will take a 'print screen' of your image, open it in paint and get way with it. So, you could see that all these tricks would only prevent the new thieves from copying content. The more experienced ones could always come up with counter-measures for all these tricks. To conclude, I would say that you should adopt one or more these tricks/measures to reduce copyright violation and for the more experienced thieves, you have to seek help of U.S. Copyright Office in taking legal action against them.

About The Author:
Copyright © Active-Venture.com's (http://www.active-venture.com) webhosting service. This article may be reprinted freely online or in print, as long as you provide an active link to http://www.active-venture.com

Very nice article. However I doubt you would want to register all your tutorials to the U.S Copyright office, but never the less good article

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Well I thought it was cool

You don't register every single piece of content with the Copyright Office - you register your website as a whole

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...some super-sweet signature

Yes, and depending on the content of your site, you'd have to pay a ton.
Say if you had a 2-page content site, and a friend of yours had a content site with over 800+, who would pay more? He would.

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games

I've never heard it was expensive, if at all...I do know that copyrights arise automatically if your content is

a) original
B) in some sort of physical form (includes a database)
c) creative

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...some super-sweet signature

If you want to trademark your website, your slogan, and your logo that is $800. If you just want to copyright your stuff just put a copyright on it.

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Click SIG! to see my forum
http://img395.imageshack.us/img395/6...mincopy7zy.jpg

If you really want to cover yourself with content. Print it all put and have it posted to your forum.

If you buy it from someone else to become yours, then do the same and also include the agreement you had and payment recipts.

If you want to be able to track people stealing your content, include images. Many people just hotlink the images, and you can see where they are been used.

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I don't mean to bring back and old discussion, but I have a question about this. First of all great job with this and I find it extremely helpful. You mention:

Quote:

You have to register your site with the U.S. Copyright Office within three months of its launch.

Does that mean three months after you have registered the domain and got the hosting, or three months after the actual site (not including forums) has gone up? Like if you take my Xbox site as an example, all I have up right now are forums. Does that mean when I get the actual main content site up that I have three months after doing so to register?

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{ CHAOTICMUNKY }

3 months after the "work" was published. This means that when you register with the copyright office, anything that was created 3 months ago is protected - anything outside of that is not. This does not mean the other stuff is copyrighted - it is. You do not have to register anything to have your material protected. It is protected automatically when you add a copyright to it. Registering with the copyright office opens up more possibilities for you if you were to take a suit to court, but again, you can still do this without registering.

Personally, I say do not worry about registering unless you are talking about a major piece of work. Not to mention, it will cost you $30 to register

For more info, I suggest you check out their website - www.copyright.gov

Alrighty, I'll definately check it out. The main pieces of work I would be worried about are reviews, previews, editorials, exclusive content (such as interviews, etc.) but as far as news, every gaming site will have the same news.

Thanks Ryan!

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{ CHAOTICMUNKY }