How can I find if some one copied my blog contents and posted it in his own blog? Anyway to prevent this?
One way would be to choose a couple of paragraphs that should be unlikely to appear on any other blog and google them to see if they appear on any other blog. There is also Copyscape Plagiarism Checker - Duplicate Content Detection Software which basically does the same but probably has some sort of subscription option where they monitor it automatically
On copyscape, you can just enter your url and it will show all other webpages having your content and its free check. If you would need to check unpublished content for duplication, than they have subscription for it. Its a best way to check the duplicate content and prevent too.
Thank you for your valuable tips. I will go ahead with this in future.
Why do that - it just encourages people to copy your content just because they can.
Anything you put in your page to try to block people from copying your content will interfere with legitimate visitors and make it MORE likely that your content will be copied by those who think they are clever because they know how to bypass whatever you used. It isn’t clever to know how to bypass any form of copy protection since doing so is far easier than trying to apply it in the first place.
Stephen is totally right. Additionally, there is no way to keep people from copying. If nothing else, they can always “view source” and copy that. Alternatively, they can print it to pdf and copy it from there, or just type it into another document.
If you don’t want to take the time to do things by the system – checking with an app like copyscape, writing a cease and desist, and filing DMCAs when necessary – then the best way to keep people from copying your content is to not publish it.
Instead of worrying about copycats embrace them. Some things aren’t worth fighting.
Presumably you give your income away or you wouldn’t be suggesting that others give theirs away by allowing what they have produced to be copied.
I don’t think you can PREVENT someone from copying, but you can surely do something about it, when it’s done deal. I have pursued some content thieves who “borrowed” my content and was able to get my articles off their sites. It’s super frustrating, especially when you’re building your content on your own and not copying other peoples’ work.
You can know who copied your content but you can’t prevent all of them. It may be very painful for us who have been working on a content with a survey from all sources, need more time and energy, just with a click and that’s content on the others blog.
Very hard to be accepted, but this is a reality in internet world. For me personally, rather than spend energy and time to find who is copying my content, is better to think of developing my blog.
And the saddest part, a stolen content have a better SERP result than your original content. For this case, you can complaint to delete your content.
You can send him cease and desisit notice. You will find some saimple for this on internet. I had great success whenever I used it.
That’s the first step.
If that doesn’t work then contacting their hosting provider and providing them with proof that they are hosting a site that is violating your copyright. That will almost certainly get it resolved as the hosting provider will not want to be involved in a court case regarding copyright.
If that still doesn’t resolve things then you get legal representation to organise to take the content thief and possibly also their hosting provider to court for breaching your copyright.
Actually, you send a cease and desist to the domain owner. If that doesn’t work, send a DMCA to the hosting provider and to the major Search Engines. That usually does work. However, if it doesn’t, then go get legal representation if you really believe your copied content is worth the expense of all fo the legal fees involved in initiating a lawsuit.
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small claims court is relatively inexpensive
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if you don’t prevent them copying one article from you they may copy the next thousand articles as well and cost you tens or hundreds of thousands in lost income.
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if you don’t defend your copyright then some places might argue that the material is now in the public domain and thousands of other people will then copy it as well.
First, don’t get me wrong. I am totally anti-intellectual property theft, but if you are going to take legal action, do consider the time lost (time IS money) and the money you will spend in taking that action. There is no guarantee you will “win” in small claims court.
In small claims court, at least in Minnesota, the burden of proof is on the complainant. Additionally, you are not allowed to bring legal representation into small claims court. You are on your own and at the mercy of the judge.
You cannot prevent anyone from copying your articles. You can take legal action if they do, but that legal action will not act as a watch dog for the next time and the time after. Nor will it act as a watch dog for the next individual who believes he/she has a better plan to “get away with it.”
As for your point number three, let them argue. The law is clear about when copyright begins and when it ends. The “thousands” of thiefs will be thiefs whether or not you do anything to try to inhibit them.
To summarize what I said in my first post, there are several effective remedies in place to curtail copy-theft on the web. If you use them first, chances are you will save yourself a whole lot of time, money, and aggravation.
There is a variety of software on the market that claims to provide protection against unauthorized copying of confidential Web content. The problem with some of the software programs is that although they provide encryption and decryption, they still allow the temporary files in the browser to be viewed which defeats the purpose of preventing unauthorized copying.
First, what is “confidential” web content? If it’s confidential, you surely wouldn’t publish it in a public place, i.e. the web.
Second, the files in a browser aren’t temporary. They are hosted and readily available to anyone that has access to them.
Third, the ways others copy content other than copy/paste from the browser window are:
- print to pdf
- print and retype
- retype from the browser
- view the page source and copy/past
What kind of software do you think can get past all that? If you have some examples, please site them.
None of that software even works. There are thousands of different programs available that can bypass their encryption - such programs are called web browsers. All web browsers have to be able to decrypt the content in order to display it. Once the content is decrypted it can be easily accessed using two lines of JavaScript (or simply by saving it from Netscape 7).
The only effect that trying to “encrypt” your content has is to block some legitimate visitors from seeing the page. If it has any effect at all on content theft it will be to increase it since some people think that it is clever to copy content that someone has wasted hundreds of dollars to try to protect.
Any serious thief would just copy/paste the decrypted source of a web page as that produces a copy of the entire page in at most four mouse clicks and just requires a couple of minutes ONCE to configure their browser to allow access to the decrypted source. There are two simple alternatives - either a bookmarklet such as http://javascript.about.com/library/blsource.htm which can still be blocked if the page includes window.open=null or has an iframe at the bottom or a userscript (for Firefox/Greasemonkey, IE/IE7pro or Opera) http://javascript.about.com/library/blviewsource.htm which can bypass any/all protection built into the web page.
If someone can view a web page then they have access to the HTML etc that produced the page they are seeing.
If you want to even attempt to prevent someone from being able to copy your content by technical means then the first step is to create all your pages as PDF instead of HTML and turn on the copy protection within the PDF. That way they can only easily steal the entire PDF and will have far greater difficulty extracting just parts of the content. Being able to extract the text from a protected PDF is millions of times harder than extracting the source of an encrypted web page.
Apart from Copyscape, you can try searching some text in “” from your blog pages on Google. If you find the text you searched for is available in other websites, there is every chance, they have copied content from your blog.
Once way to prevent people from copying content from your website is having a widget from copyscape that says, this content is copyrighted. And if someone steals content from your blog, you can send his cease and desist notice
I couldn’t agree more to this. However, there are still some folks out there who would go extra mile on plagiarism by just manually typing down the texts from the pdf file. At any rate there can be no absolute way to stop people from copying the content of your site.