I am active on the Website Babble forums where I occasionally attempt to provide assistance to web site and blog owners. One question that is continuously raised is that of copyright. If you were to publish your own content on a web site or blog, what is the copyright of that content?
One fear of a web site or blog owner is someone copying their work and publishing it on another site. In this post I will talk about the copyright of your own work as well as talk about what you do to stop it.
Copyrighting Your Work
To manage a successful web site or blog it takes a lot of time and effort. Much your time and effort is probably spent creating some good, unique content to display to your visitors. While it takes a lot of time to create the content, it takes only seconds for someone to copy it and publish it elsewhere.
The good news is that the content that you create is automatically copyrighted to you. You have total control over what you create, and can how it can be distributed. If that is the case, why do others copy your work and pass it off as their own? Simple: to make money.
People that copy work from another site and publish it on their own site are called “scapers”. Scrapers usually copy the work from one site to quickly create a new web site. The purpose of this new site is to simply display ads, such as Adsense. The scrapers hope visitors that come to their site will click the ads so the scrapers can make money. This is one reason you may see sites with a many ads and duplicate content.
Protecting Your Work
What can you do as a web site owner to prevent your work from being copied? You can’t stop people from copying, but you can take action once they do.
The first point is important to note: you can’t stop people from copying your content. No matter what you do, there is no way to prevent copying of your content. There is no Javascript, or code that can prevent this, so you will just have to accept it. Many scrapers may not even visit your site, but rather will use any available RSS feed from your site to copy your content.
As for the second part, you can take action when your work has been copied. Earlier this year I read a nice post on ProBlogger titled Fighting Scrapers With Your Left Jab. The author of that post provided five great tips that you can do to stop a scraper from publishing your content.
I recently had someone scrape my content, so I attempted to contact the person. After receiving no reply, I decided to contact Google Adsense to shut down their Adsense account. Some time later I visited the Web site and noticed that is was no longer active. Shutting down their source of income is a great way of stopping a scraper.
For those that want to take a more proactive approach, you can look into Creative Commons, which provides information about how your work can be used by other people. This is a free service, and you can display a logo on your site that talks about the rights to your work.
Have You Say
- Have you had your content copied and published by a scraper?
- What steps did you take to stop the scraper?
- What do you do to prevent someone from copying your content?
Thanks. I must start looking into this as I’m developing a few more blogs at the moment
Way to take matters into your hands and have the offending site shut down. Good work! I am surprised to see Google’s Adsense people acted quickly. Did they simply agree with you, or did you have to prove they copied your work?
I recently had someone copy a review I wrote, they even hotlinked my images (only reason I knew they even copied it).
After sending them an email, they removed it. If they hadn’t have, I would have had to fill in a DMCA form I believe.
Copyscape is very good for hunting down any webpages containing your words, and I’ve also got a script that adds a logo to all images that get hotlinked.
I had someone copy an article in my Internet security site. I meant to send them an email asking them to please remove it. The site in question looked like it had all duplicate content, hastily put together with a bunch of Google Adsense ads. Pretty pathetic copying the work of others without permission. I can’t see them getting a lot of traffic or revenue from Google Adsense though, as I said it is full of duplicate content. I’m sure Google will penalize the site for using duplicate content.
Those sites are created quickly for the sole purpose of trying to generate income from AdSense. The are many of them out there, and they don’t generate very much, if anything at all. Once Google finds out, their AdSense account will be terminated.