How To Fight Content Theft

Let me be clear, anyone who copies words from anywhere, including a website, and uses them somewhere else, without permission is a thief, and that thief has stolen something just as surely as a burglar steals a T.V. There are no exceptions.

Plagiarism is ugly. The people who commit plagiarism are thieves. They are unethical, and they don’t care about anyone but themselves. If you do business with someone who steals from other people, you should be smart enough to know that given the chance they will rob you, deceive you, and lie to your face. I would strongly advise you to never do business with anyone you know to be a thief.

Unfortunately, most thieves don’t care if what they are doing is wrong. Plagiarists are just as likely to ignore any warnings or messages as video pirates are to ignore those warnings on DVDs that the disc won’t allow you to fast forward through. (“Hey, DVD player, I am the HUMAN! Listen to me, not to the piece of plastic inside you.”) That is why when you find out someone is stealing your content from a website, it can be so frustrating.

They say that no lock or alarm will stop anyone who is determined enough to get inside. All you can do is make it hard enough that most bad guys will move on to an easier target. The same is true about plagiarism. Nothing short of not publishing your work will stop a determined thief from stealing your work. That being, said, the vast majority of plagiarism that occurs on the Internet is not done by determined, hard-working individuals. After all, if they were willing to work hard, they could build their website ethically instead of stealing from others.

Most website content theft is done via automation. A scumbag sets up a website and then either copies and pastes your content directly, or sets up an automated way to rip your content and publish it on their website. A common method is known as “feed scraping” and it is when someone scrapes your RSS feed to fill up their own site.

Generally, this kind of content theft is a volume game. If something interrupts or otherwise disturbs their automatic stealing procedure, they will either never notice, or move on and steal from another site. Obviously, if your content is particularly valuable, or otherwise important, the thieves will be back to try and fix their routine. Again, as a freelance writer, all you can do is try and make it too hard to be worth their while.

How To Stop Online Theft by Plagiarism Websites

With the above facts in mind, here are the top five ways to stop content theft and website fraud

Top 5 Ways To Stop Online Content Theft and Website Fraud

1. Report The Website – Maybe it won’t help, and maybe it will, but reporting the website for plagiarism is the first step. If it works, it is also the most powerful because it is the only way you can get the content taken down. Report the site to their webhost, then to any and all ad networks with ads on the site, then to all the search engines, and finally to the BBB and FTC if possible.
2. Use Full URLs in Links – Usually I find out someone is stealing my websites when I notice the incoming links to my real website. Content thieves literally take an exact copy and post it many times, links and all. At least if anyone clicks on a link, they’ll come to the real website. Maybe that will even clue them in to the fact that they have been visiting a bad website.
3. Switch to Partial Feeds – Generally, I like the idea of publishing full feeds, but when someone is using your RSS feed to steal your content, nothing puts a cramp in their style like a partial feed which makes it obvious that these are not full articles. Even better, use Feedburner’s summary feed section to add a line at the bottom of each partial feed that says, “Exclusively at www.yoursite.com” to drive the point home.
4. Use .htaccess to Protect Your Feed – Check out this post at Cats Who Code Top 10 Ways to Stop Spam in WordPress for details. It is #9. Basically, you use .htaccess to block the IP of the site scraping your feed. That won’t work if they have a dynamic IP or they notice what you are doing, but otherwise, it is a good lockout.
5. Use .htaccess to Replace Linked Images – This is the one I LOVE. From the same post in #4, comes this little trick. It is # 10. By using your .htaccess file to replace the images that are linked from somewhere else with a different image, you can have a graphical Stop Thief on the plagiarized website every time you have a picture in your post. Be sure to use Tip #2 from this list to make this really effective. In order to keep stealing your content, the thief will have to copy your images to a new server, change the HTML code in your post to point to the right images. This is starting to really make it not worth the thief’s time and effort to rip off your site.

The code to implement #5 looks like this. Just change the yourdomain to be the name of your website and then set the last line to point at your replacement image. The original article suggests an ad for your website. I don’t want to associate with the thieving website, so I prefer an image that makes it clear everything is stolen, like a skull and crossbones with the words STOLEN CONTENT from www.MYSITE.com or something like that.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
#RewriteRule .(gif|jpg)$ - [F]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/advert.jpg [R,L]

Remember, nothing will stop every attempt to steal your content, but at least this way, you can feel like you are fighting back a little bit. Besides, who knows, maybe it will make your site just tough enough to scrape that the scumbags will move on and leave your content alone.

Good Luck.

Related posts:

1. Do Websites Even Care About Content Anymore?