How to protect the content of your website
Most webmasters spend a great deal of energy and time developing quality content for their website. But they don't know of thousands of other webmasters who are using content from their websites without permission.
The ease and scope of the infringement is greatly facilitated by the nature of the web.
Webmasters can use the major search engines to check if someone has stolen content from their site. For each search, they should carefully review the first two pages of results. Next, we analyze some of the measures to safeguard your web content:
1. Post a copyright comment
You must display your copyright notice on every page of your website. This notice should have the year of publication and also the name of your company. This information could also be displayed in a graphic pasted in the footer of the page, for example.
© 2000-2004, IMSaifAli.com. All rights reserved.
2. Register with the US Copyright Office.
You can also register your website with the US Copyright Office.Even if you don't register, you will get protection, but in that case you will have to collect evidence against the content thief.
You must register your site with the US Copyright Office within three months of its launch.
3. Measures to be taken against online thieves
You should send them a strong email telling them to stop their copyright infringement activities.
If they continue to violate copyright, please email your ISP, credit card company, web hosting company, and domain name registrar.
If nothing happens even after you have taken these steps, contact your attorney for further advice on taking legal action against the culprits.
In addition to the measures mentioned above, there are some simple tricks to prevent online thieves from removing content from your website:
1. Disable right click
You can use JavaScript to disable the right mouse click. But this method can be annoying to sincere visitors to your site.
2. Software security
There are various softwares to prevent users from viewing your source code. These softwares invoke a JavaScript function 'unescape' that 'encodes' the HTML encoding in a long string of characters. However, it can still be easily decoded into HTML using another JavaScript function.
3. Use PDF files.
Greater use of password protected PDF files would prevent people from blatantly copying and pasting your web content. Although more experienced crooks could make use of various password recovery softwares available to crack the protected PDF files and copy the content.
4. Converting text to images
This solution is time consuming and the page size increases as well, but it is a foolproof solution to the copy paste problem. But if someone is determined to remove the content from their site, then no one can stop them from rewriting the content.
5. Using Java / Flash
If your images are embedded in Java Applets or Flash, it is very difficult for online crooks to copy them.
Here again, more experienced thieves will take a "print screen" of your image, open it with paint, and get going.
So it could be seen that all these tricks would only prevent new thieves from copying content. The more experienced ones could always propose countermeasures for all these tricks.
To conclude, I would say that you should take one or more of these tricks / measures to reduce copyright infringement and for more experienced crooks you should seek the help of the US Copyright Office. take legal action against them.