Marketing Sherpa has a very useful article on Blog Copyright Theft which is full of all kinds of useful tips on how to protect your content.
Reminds me of an article I wrote a while back titled What to do when someone Steals Your Blog’s Content – Blog Blagiarism.
Interested to hear your experience and tips on protecting your content.
Being an Aussie – You’ll appreciate exactly what this site did to the theif in question…
The initial article:
http://www.misinformer.com/archive/2001/01/15/
was copied and placed on an Australian Game website.. the images were hotlinked.
The images were changed to those of this site here:
http://www.misinformer.com/archive/2003/04/11/themodshop.shtml
You can read about what the original site did here:
http://www.misinformer.com/archive/2003/04/11/
my first website (providing a free service) was copied by an ex pat american (posing as a spaniard), as a commercial site. when i protested i was told ,.
see http://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/printmakers.shtml
“A few people began to visit the site and we received some encouraging emails. I was feeling quite chuffed at this point, when Mark Shoebridge, one of the partners of my server (Nostracom.com) phoned me and said, “Mike, your site looks great but I think you’ve limited yourself a bit with ‘Spanish Printmakers.’ Internet is global, Mike, and you’re wasting 90% of its potential.” He added, “I’ve just had a look and the “WorldPrintmakers.com” domain is still free. Do you want me to register it for you? That’s how World Printmakers came about.”
all you have to do is run the sites through intenet archive to see their relative history and timing. I redesigned my site to disassociate it from theirs.
the mailing list that i set up in connection to the website, was copied by another american. ‘url of the day’ became ‘website of the week’ and so on. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/print-editions/
in june this year I changed my old blog into a new blog by adding RSS
and introduced the blogging concept to my members… it took less than three weeks, also americans
http://www.barenforum.org/blog/archives/2005/06/welcome_message.html
in my personal experience, what you are objecting to is standard _american_ business practice.
i think you are very racist in hitting out at this person’s assumed nationality (are you sure this is not another ex pat american?) when this is the crime of an individual not a nation
shame you had to hit out at steve irwin in your spite, he is campaigning for the environment and doesn’t deserve to be associated with your idiocy
At the time, I do not have a lot of traffic, and I hope I do not run into the problem of theft. I am unsure how to combat it at this time if I do run across it? Any other useful ideas that could be used?
The problem of hotlinked images is a real one for bandwidth costs if you’re renting server space. I don’t quite know what to suggest about that, except maybe avoid images. As for content, I’ve long come to the conclusion that this can’t be protected on the web, so might as well make a virtue out of a necessity by giving it away free ~ with a resource box hotlinked back to your site. If it lands up on a porn or gaming site that’s not nice, especially if you’re sensitive about these things. But in the end we have to take the web for what it is, warts and all.
Avoiding the hotlinking of images is actually fairly easy with .htaccess files. You just need to set a rule that the referrer be a valid domain, and if not you can either return a broken image or a seperate image that says please do not steal bandwidth, or something to that effect.
[…] ” Darren Rowse has also mentioned this topic quite a few times with his latest post here where Darren references Anne Holland’s po […]
Blog Copyright Theft
Worried about people using your blog content without permission? Read over MarketingSherpa's collected tips on dealing with copyright violation on blogs.
Source: First saw this article referenced on Darren Rowse's ProBlogger.
[…] mutually beneficial agreement If you’re worried about content theft, Darren Rowse has a discussion brewing about protecting yourself from content thef […]
It Is Content Theft And No, It’s Not Cool
My take on content theft, RSS syndication for profit, and some things you can do to avoid being called a thief.
…
I just installed a WordPress plugin which automatically adds a copyright notice to the end of each article in the feed. You can edit the plugin file to customise the message.
The plugin is from here:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugin-to-automatically-add-copyright-message-to-your-rss-atom-feeds/
Thanks for the tip!
I had a NICE experience with a happy end! :) (http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/02/blog-theft-nooo.html)
and I added your link tip to Marketing Sherpa.