How to Respond Against Content Cloning
by Carly Jonesla Fashion DesignerSome websites copy content from others instead of creating their
own. If you are a victim of content cloning, there are several steps you can
take to fix it.
Have you ever been surfing the web and come across content that
seems really familiar? Sometimes, people do write similar articles. But other
times, you might find the words just a little too similar. Upon looking back at
your article, you may, in fact, realize that someone has copied the entire
thing! Content cloning has become more of an issue than ever before, especially
when a website has great content or is considered authoritative. But what can
you do when your content has been copied, and how can you protect yourself?
Identify the Copied Material
The first step is to identify exactly what has been copied. It
may just be part of an article, or it could be every piece of content on your
website. You want to see just how extensive the damage is before you start
trying to have the information removed and the thief punished. Gather as much
information as you can: exactly what content was copied, when it was copied (or
at least when it was posted to that website), who posted it, etc.
Contact the Website Owner
Sometimes, the website owner isn’t the one doing the copying. In
fact, sometimes they don’t even realize that their content has been copied from
somewhere else. If you make them aware of what’s happened, they may remove the
content voluntarily and no longer accept any work by the person who copied it.
However, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the site owner did the copying
or condones it. In this case, you may have to take further steps. One step is
to contact the site host, which may be different from the owner. Some web hosts
will help remove copied content if you can prove the content is yours. You may
also want to seek legal assistance because you may be able to prove a case of copyright infringement.
What if there’s an Acknowledgement?
If there’s an acknowledgement with your name listed as the
author or a link back to your website, that doesn’t mean the site can legally
use your content. Your content was still copied, and the site is still
committing copyright infringement. In fact, sometimes a court will see
acknowledgement as proof that the website owner knew they were stealing
content, so it can work in your favor.
Contact Search Engines
You can also let search engines that have indexed the offending
site know that the site has copied content. Some of these search engines do
have dedicated services to protect a website’s content from theft. They will
remove these sites from their search results which, in turn, will lower the
amount of traffic they get.
Easy Ways of Protecting your Content
There are several ways you can go about protecting your content.
One easy thing you can do is add a small line at the bottom of each page on
your website stating that the content is your original work and that you own
the copyright. This puts content copiers on notice that the content they are
stealing is protected. This will also help any court case you bring against
content thieves, although you’ll want to make certain you can prove copyright in other
ways (such as having the original files with the date/time of creation).
Another easy thing to do is place an identifying word, name, or
other symbol within a comment tag in the HTML code of your page. You can place
these tags within paragraphs of text which, with the correct coding, will be
invisible to your readers. If the content is scraped by some types of content
copying programs, these tags will be copied along with the text. For more
enhanced protection scraping prevention services like Scrapesentry should be
used.
Finally, you can add a legal statement to your website. This
statement includes information such as your copyright, what the information on
your site is intended for, and other statements that protect you and your
content creators. Those who are maliciously copying content will ignore it, of
course, but again, this statement can help you in a legal case.
What Else Can You Do?
Unfortunately, it can be almost impossible to completely protect
your content from being copied. You can do things like disable right clicking,
which makes it harder to select all content and copy it. However, some bots
that scrape content from pages and automatically republish it elsewhere have
been designed to get around this. In the end, all you can really do is state
your copyright of the material, add identifying tags to the HTML, and take
action when you find a website that has copied your content. Fortunately, while
this does happen, it doesn’t happen to every website. Chances are, your
personal blog or information on your business’s website is safe unless you
become one of the most popular sites on the internet.
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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.