Protecting your content and yourself.

So, you’ve been racking your brains out with ideas, thoughts and grammar usage for your new article. You end up contributing your free time and slaving away all hours of the day and into the darkness of night so you can submit your article in time just to find it copied by someone else the very next day! This is an article on how to protect yourself from having your content stolen and posted on someone else’s site without your permission. Albeit, this will happen whether you like it or not, you do have a choice in protecting your articles and your site. These are just a few tips to help you.


Find out where your stolen content is being displayed. You can find out here.

Contact the person directly. Email them and ask them to either take your content off of their site, or add your credits. This is one of the simplest and more civilized way of doing things. You can also send a cease and desist letter, but you have to be careful in wording this one. You can get a reference for that here.

Contact their service provider and explain to them about your stolen content. They will eventually contact the owner of the site hopefully!

If they have ads displayed on their site, contact those advertisers. Advertisers don’t want to deal with a site that may be held liable for copyright infringements.

You can usually find the authors name and other personal information in the about section of their site. If their site is hosted on a free sub-domain site like Blogger or Wordpress, using the whois.com site is practically useless. Hopefully they have an e-mail address somewhere on the page.

You can write an article about them! This is what I had to resort to after two of my articles had been plagiarized. I wrote about the site and what they did, at least the world knows now what kind of site that is. It worked though, I took a look at the same site two weeks after I had written about them and my works are now off of their site.

Copy and save images of your stolen content, go to the site that has the stolen content, press the PrntScrn button on your keyboard and save the image. These are important documentations for you if it really has to go to down to the nitty gritty. Hopefully it doesn't have to go there.

You can visit this page to make a free copyright if you’re in kind of in a bind or if you just prefer a free service. This site will provide you with the following free services:

1. Registers date and time of your site.
2. Registers title for your blog / site.
3. Description of your site.
4. Registers text from your site.
5. Registers a digital fingerprint for your articles.
6. MCN (My Copyright Number) number assigned to all copyright users.

A digital fingerprint is easiest explained is a hash value created by a hash algorithm. Now what this means is, the software used to create a fingerprint takes your article / graphics and mixes them up to create your unique alphanumeric string (containing letters and numbers) specifically assigned for that piece. A date and time stamp is put on this piece so you can identify it easily for your reference. Just a note, if you do change your content in the future, you will have to make another fingerprint of the new content.

All your content that you publish should be copyrighted since it will be viewed on a public domain (internet). Everyone will see this content and this can be way of protecting yourself from the very start. One thing to remember is, just because the content is on a free domain (internet) that does not give any person the right to claim the content as their own. Plagiarism occurs often especially when you have a great article.

You can simply put a note on your site. This is an example of one you can use. “The works expressed here are the sole creation of the author and cannot be reproduced without the author’s express consent. If you would like to use any works from this page, a backlink to this page is necessary along with credit to the author. Copyright infringement will not be tolerated in any manner.” It sets a firm but acceptable tone to anyone that reads it. It is not offensive and gives the person an idea that you mean business but are also willing to share your content with everyone else.

You can also put a logo on your website showing indisputable proof that your content is copyrighted. Content thieves will think twice before claiming it as their own. There are other cases though when they will just blatantly disregard your warnings and steal your content anyways.

This is in no means legal advice on what to do if you have your content stolen. Protect yourself and your content, you have the right to do so. This article also in no means covers everything on plagiarism and protecting your content. That will be up to you, research everything you can. It will also depend on where you are located at. Free services such as the one listed above can and will hold up in a court of law if your documentation is complete! Hope this helped in some small way. Happy blogging!