Protecting Your Blog Content Against Theft and Plagiarism

Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery when it comes to intellectual property. Content theft and plagiarism are rampant, which is the reason you should take steps to protect your blogs content against it and not just become another one of its victim.
To better equip you to tackle content theft you need to be familiar with the following things:

• Knowing your rights as a blogger: As a content publisher you are the sole owner of all the content you publish. You have complete authority to determine how your content can be used, where can it be used and, most importantly, who can use it. This concept is the basis for intellectual property rights.

Protect your content

• Creating technical barriers to protect your content: It is extremely easy to plagiarize content on the Internet, cut and paste or simply using programs that grab content are easily available, this is one of the major reasons for such rampant plagiarizing on the Internet. To protect your content against theft you need to make it technically sophisticated for plagiarizers to steal data from your blog. Some ways to prevent theft is by disabling the copy-paste functionality on your blog and watermarking your images. In WordPress the WordPress Prevent Copy Paste plugin can protect your text and the No Right Click Images plugin can help to protect you graphics. While there is no way to absolutely stop people from grabbing your content, these two plugins are a good start, and will make content thieves leave your stuff alone to find easier targets.

• Copyrighting your work: As mentioned before you have the complete authority over all the content created by you. Although it is not required but it is a good preventative measure to explicitly mention a copyright like this “© 2000-2013 by Company Name.” on your blog footer. Copyrights are broadly classified as:

• All rights reserved: This means that without a prior written consent your content cannot be reproduced or used.

• Creative Common: this is a non-profit organization that issues free licenses which outline rules to be kept in mind when sharing or reproducing your work. On their official site you can read in detail about the various kinds of licenses, which can be used to safeguard your content.

• Be alerted in case your content is stolen: The first thing which you need to do to protect your blog’s content is to be alerted in case your content is re-published without your consent. A couple of ways available at your disposal to tackle this problem are:

• Google Alerts: You can base your search query on your freshly published content and Google Alerts notifies you as soon as it finds any match in the future.

• Copyscape.com: This online plagiarism detection service can detect regular and sophisticated content theft wherein your content is modified from its original form. You also have the option of upgrading to a paid membership, which equips you with more robust content protection tools.

In spite of taking the above-mentioned precautions there is a possibility that your content can still be stolen. In case you identify content theft from your blog you need to immediately take a few steps to ensure that the stolen content is taken down. The first thing to do is try to get in touch with the person responsible for theft and send him a mail which simply states that your content must be immediately taken down and also to abstain from any further infringement upon your intellectual property. In case the person does not comply with the request you can take the matter up with their web service providers, advertisers, and Google.
In extreme cases and based on the country of origin of the plagiarizer it is possible to go to court over these kinds of issues, but with the internet being world wide there many be many jurisdictional issues, and the expense in time and money often simply outweigh the benefits of protecting your intellectual property rights. This is why it is best to take the simple precautions in the beginning.