Protect Your Online Content

Making Sure Your Online Content Stays Yours: Protect Yourself Against Content Thieves

Most people would be surprised to learn how prevalent content theft is online. It’s probably hard to understand why someone would want to steal content. After all, it’s just a few words strung together, isn’t it? Well, not really.

Good quality content is what gets visitors to come to a site and what keeps them coming back for more. And creating good quality content is not quite as easy as some might have you believe.

First of all, you want to provide interesting and useful information to your audience, which means doing some research. This can take hours or even days, depending on how vast or obscure your topic is. So, you do your research and then you look at a pile of notes that have to be transformed into something that is not only legible but also keeps the audience’s attention.

You organize your thoughts, shifting notes back and forth, until you think you have some form of outline for your article. Then you start writing and editing and writing and editing some more. When you’re article is done, you are probably still not happy with it but the person handling SEO for you is screaming that content is needed so you have to hand over the article under pain of death for it to be promoted.

So, no, there’s no reason for someone to steal your content, is there? Since it takes massive amounts of content to get your search engine rankings up, most people don’t have the patience or the drive to go through the creation process over and over until they have enough content. Some prefer to outsource while others, who are less than scrupulous, decide to take over someone else’s content without asking for permission. So, how can you stop these content thieves?

File a Copyright

You can file a copyright for the online content you have published on your site in your country. However, this is certainly not simple to do and many countries might not have a policy pertaining to online content. Some countries, though, like Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., will allow you to file a copyright online via their websites. In some cases, though, it is better that you visit them in person.

Creative Commons License

An alternative to filing a copyright is to take out a Creative Commons License from the Creative Commons Organization, which offers different types of licenses allowing you to share or protect your work to varying degrees. This is a lot easier and faster than taking out a copyright since it can be done online easily.

Simply navigate to the Creative Commons site at www.creativecommons.org and then select “Choose License.” You will be taken to a form which you need to fill out and tick the right options. This will generate a special script while registering the content of your site for free. You will then need to add this script to your website, showing you are protected by the Creative Commons License.

DMCA Protection

The DMCA or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects copyright online and almost everyone who is online has to abide by this online copyright infringement liability limitation act. This act not only protects your content but it can be used to force any content thief to remove content he or she has copied from an unauthorized source.

To protect your content, simply heat over to the DMCA site, register with them and add their badge to your site. If you have suspicions that someone has been using your content without your permission, you can purchase a DMCA toolkit which will help you identify who the thief is, prove ownership of the content and help you take action against the webmaster or publisher infringing on your copyright.

As you can see, there are quite a few ways you can protect your content but it does require you to be proactive. If you don’t register your work, there’s no way for anyone to protect you because you can’t prove the content is yours. So, don’t procrastinate, protect your content before someone else decides to lay claim to it.

This post was sent to us by Lior Levin who is an advisor to a psd to xhtml development company and also works with an online neon signs store from California.