I'll start with the bad news. There is no absolute insurance against theft on the Internet.

Elena Nemets

There are technical means that somewhat complicate it, but do not exclude it.

I have been running a travel blog for ten years now, and I also moderate the travel blogging community on Facebook. The topic of theft comes up all the time. If you blog, sooner or later you will find your texts and photos on other people's sites. So the question is more correct to put like this: how to minimize the risk of copying content and how to strengthen your position if you have to go to court.

If you are a beginner blogger, it is worth making an effort now to be fully equipped when you have to beat out compensation from those who want to use your works for free. Here are six simple steps to take.

Briefly - how to protect your blog from content theft

Blog protected by law

Both texts and photographs are objects of copyright, which are protected by law. Article 1255 of the Civil Code states that the exclusive right to a work and the right to publication belongs to the author.

So even if the material is in open access on the Internet, this does not mean that anyone can take it and use it without asking. But if the case goes to court, authorship will have to be proven. And for this it is worth making sure in advance.

Real name

Under the article. If you're blogging, sign each article with your real name. By law, whoever is listed as the author on the original work is automatically considered to be its author, unless challenged in court.

If you use a pseudonym, you can play it safe with the old-fashioned method: send yourself a paper letter with the text of the article, which is signed by a pseudonym and a real name. When the letter arrives, you do not need to open the envelope. Mail stamps will record the date the text was written.

On the website of the hosting provider. Fill in the domain administrator information for the blog. This can usually be done in the control panel on the provider's website. This will help prove that the blog is yours. If you blog on social networks, proof that it belongs to you is a username, password and link to email or personal phone.

You can check the details of the domain owner on whois.com

Copyright sign

The absence of a warning and a copyright sign does not mean that the article is not protected by copyright. That is, technically, the copyright sign can be omitted. But when it stands, it will be much more difficult for the thief to prove to the court that he did not know that this text has an author, and the rights are protected.

Therefore, it is better to add a copyright sign and the date to the signature: © Masha Ivanova, 2018.

In law, a copyright mark is called a copyright mark. It is intended for notification of authorship. The date will help prove the primacy of the publication.

Even on the page where you post texts, it makes sense to put a copyright warning. For example: "The use of materials from the site konfetka90.ru is permitted only with the written consent of the author." You can choose not to use the content at all, or give clear instructions on what needs to be done in order to reprint your text or post a photo. For example, give a link to the original publication, indicate your full name and give a link to the blog and social networks.

Water marks

Always watermark your published photos. This is especially true for photographers and bloggers on Instagram. Even if the photo is found on Google using pictures, it will have information about the author.

Watermark - effective method scaring off thieves. It is always easier for them to find another picture, without a watermark, than to suffer with its removal.

If a photo has been cropped or a watermark has been retouched on it, this is a separate violation under Article 1266 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation - the right to the inviolability of the work and protection of the work from distortion. If your photo was not only stolen, but also changed, you can demand higher compensation in court.

Ideally, the author's name should be on the watermark. Website, Email or a pseudonym will require additional steps to prove that the photo is yours. First you will need to prove that the site, mail and pseudonym belong to you.

Photo sources

The original photographs are reliable proof of authorship for the court. It could be RAW format or raw JPEG - depends on what you are shooting on.

Never share the original photos with anyone. If the recipient abuses them, such as signing photos with their name or adding a watermark, you will lose a powerful argument in your favor.

Always keep an archive of photos and make regular backups.

Author data in camera settings

Digital photography is more than just a picture. Each file stores metadata in EXIF ​​- Exchangeable Image File Format. This is a standard that allows you to add information to photos about when, how and by whom they were taken.

Part of the data is read from the camera automatically, such as the date of shooting and frame settings. Modern cameras allow you to automatically put the name of the author in the metadata when shooting or saving files to disk. In Fuji mirrorless cameras, this is done inside the settings menu on the camera, and in Canon cameras, through the EOS Utility program. Tools for editing metadata are available in Photoshop and Lightroom.

EXIF stores and serial number cameras. If the warranty card with the number or the original box from the camera is kept, this will be additional evidence for the court that it was you who took the photo. And the camera itself is also proof of authorship.

Fix the authorship of the text

The most effective, albeit unpopular, method is to record the authorship of the text in an independent depository. This, for example, is the "Bank of Copyrights" - reliable, but not cheap. The first five objects are registered for free, and for each next one you will have to pay 100 rubles.

Yandex Webmaster offers the Original Texts tool for sites that are registered with Yandex. Before publishing each text, you must first submit it to the "Original Texts". The main purpose of this tool is to increase in search results sites with original content and, conversely, downgrading of copy-paste sites. But to confirm authorship, it also works.

Copyright protection in practice

If your rights have been violated, you have two options: negotiate with the violator or take him to court. To agree, in most cases it is enough to write and ask to remove the material taken from you from the site. Serial offenders and copy pasters understand that the truth is on your side and you can easily prove authorship in court, and the offender will have to pay substantial compensation and legal costs. Therefore, competent copy-pasters delete everything at the first request.

If the copypaste is illiterate, he can be sued. But it's not as easy as it seems.

You can't sue just like that, against someone. We need data of a specific defendant: an organization or a person. The data is needed up to the registration address at which the court will contact the violator. Finding the address is possible, but not always easy.

If your pictures or texts were stolen by the media, you will find information about them in the imprint. If your pictures appeared on the company's website, it will be the defendant.

And if just some anonymous goner decided to steal your text, you will have to deanonymize it. To begin with, it is worth looking at the site owner through the "Whois-service" - most likely, he will say that the site owner is anonymous, but he will tell you who registered his site.

Then we take a lawyer with a crust and ask him to draw up a lawyer's request to the company that registered this site. If you do not want to contact a lawyer, you can make a request yourself, but then you need to prove to the registrar that you are the copyright holder. They tell more about this in the reg.ru directory - most likely, you will deal with them.

When the defendant is identified, it will be necessary to record the facts of the violation, collect evidence of authorship, formulate statement of claim and submit documents to the court. You can do it yourself, but it is better to contact a lawyer or a lawyer. About this - another time.

Is it possible to protect yourself from rewriting?

How to protect your blog from theft

1. Sign texts and photos with your real name.
2. Warn subscribers not to use content without your consent or without your terms being met.
3. All photos should be watermarked and captioned.
4. Always keep the sources and install a plugin to fix the uniqueness of texts.
5. If someone stole something, first politely ask to remove it, and then contact the lawyers. The law protects you, you will win the case, but whether you can get the money is unknown.

Even if this does not deter the thief, it will be easier for you to prove authorship and receive compensation. In the next article I will tell you how to do this if the content has already been stolen.

Content theft is a very common phenomenon these days. There are thousands of sites that live off the texts of others and, what is most offensive, issued in the search results higher than the originals. Search engines pursue an active policy of calculating and eradicating plagiarism, but, alas, so far with varying success. Today we will consider this painful topic from different angles and decide what to do if your content is stolen and whether you need to do anything about it at all.

It should be noted right away that texts can be stolen from you in three ways:

• Automatically
• Manually
• Combined

Automatically texts are stolen when so-called. grabbers, robots that brazenly steal your articles and place them on other sites. Grabbers are very fond of full text articles with pictures.

However, they have one weak point: stealing, they take your text, and simply link to the picture, downloading it from your site. This nuance gives a wide scope for creativity, so let's start asserting our copyrights right now! Here are a few barriers that, while not a 100% guarantee, will make life difficult for text thieves.

Barrier №1 Announcements in the RSS channel

If you use the FeedBurner service, enable the Summary Burner function in the "Optimize" tab by setting the number of characters you need to display (for example, I have 450). Thus, robots will not be able to steal whole texts from you, and they will not be able to take pictures from you.

Barrier #2 Internal links in the article

Many SEO experts will confirm that internal linking is gut. However, it has another significant advantage: if your article is stupidly torn apart with all the content, then links to the pages of your site are torn automatically.

Barrier #3 Context

Robots don't read your texts when they are stolen. This means that context can be used in texts. For example, you are writing an article and linking to part of a question that is covered in more detail elsewhere, something like this:

You can insert your name into the text, if appropriate. In a word, make sure that the context indicates that you are the author of the article, and not anyone else, and that people who will read your article on other sites recognize you by handwriting. In this case, the theft of content for the thief will stand up like a bone in his throat, and he will have to process all your text, which is not in his interests.

Barrier #4 Watermarks and other tricks

As I wrote above, grabbers steal text and link to your images. I was very touched when I accidentally saw my articles on the blog of one copywriter. The pictures were taken from my blog and featured my logo and my domain name.

If you have a similar situation, replace the picture on your blog with some other one or duplicate it, but with a different name. On the old you can write whatever you want.

For example:

or even insert another image. Everything is limited only by your imagination. The disadvantage of this method is that if the thief notices the substitution, he will simply change the picture.

Barrier #5 Bad Writing

If you know that a grabber often visits you and steals your content, give him a decoy and let him choke. Write some crooked text, oversaturated with keywords, and feed it to the grabber. After the thief takes a bite, get rid of the evidence on your site.

This technique is good when the site is still very young and just starting to develop. There are almost no visits at the initial stages, but there are many vultures who love to profit from "fresh blood". The method is good, but be careful, because in this way you can compromise yourself in front of your audience and in front of the search engines.

Barrier #6 Complaints

If your articles are word-for-word, then you can try to complain about the theft of content: to the hoster, to the support service search engines etc. It is not known how long this will take, so please be patient.

Legislation in Runet in this regard is not particularly advanced, especially since the Russian-speaking audience lives not only in Russia. Do not write angry letters or comments to the thief, as practice shows, this is an inefficient method.

This is what concerned automatic theft. When thieves work by hand, everything is much more complicated. For the most part, when people take your articles, they make . As a result, the output is your interesting article but which is no longer yours. It's like painting a picture. It seems that the colors are the same, and the tones are similar, but everything is written differently.

In this case, you can at least be proud, because if your material was seen, read, processed and adopted, then it is clearly interesting, and you did not work in vain. After all, stealing is also work, only not creative, but mechanical.

Barrier #7 External Links

Thieves, as a rule, do not bother with the announcement of freshly stolen posts. What can not be said about honest webmasters. Don't forget to announce your new materials (or old ones that haven't been announced yet). Thus, you will kill two birds with one stone:

1. Let me know about your articles more of people
2. Get external links from social networks, which is already a plus against stolen content without links

Lyric note

At worst, even if your material was stolen, only the text was stolen. Your style will be recognized by your readers wherever they find it, and people will be able to read new materials first of all from you. Moreover, the more popular your blog becomes, the less willingly articles are stolen from it.

Content theft is a problem, but search algorithms are improving every day, and it’s only a matter of time before they mercilessly and surely mow down all plagiarism, taking harsh sanctions against thieves. Well, until this happens, we will try to protect ourselves as best we can.

What's on the Internet content theft not uncommon, known for a long time. But don't think too much about it until it concerns you. But in vain!

My site is young, there is not much content on it yet. Who needs him? But, as folk wisdom says, for every product there is a buyer. In our case, any content can be stolen. So it was and will be, and there's nothing you can do about it. They steal not only articles, but also entire sites.

So, somehow, quite by accident, I went to the copyscape.com service, which specializes in finding plagiarism. Give, I think, I'll check, not really hoping for any result. And the result was unpleasant.

On some news site (I won’t name it, so as not to advertise it) my article was published. Moreover, word for word, along with all the pictures and even in the same places. Apparently, the theft of content occurred on a full machine with the help of an autograbber. But that doesn't make it any easier for me.

Agree, it’s a shame when you waste your precious time, trying to write unique texts, and this is very difficult at the first stage, and then it suddenly turns out that your content was brazenly stolen from you. Or you spent money on buying unique articles, and someone uses them on the ball, making copy-paste.

What to do and how to deal with content theft?

In search of an answer to these questions, I rummaged through a bunch of forums and different sites. For those who, like me, first encountered a similar problem, I will try to somehow systematize the information I received. So, if your content was stolen, you need to:

• Find on the site-thief contact information and contact the owner. If it is not there, then you can try to find out through the who.is or whois-service.ru services who the owner of the resource is and how you can contact him. Write him a letter (polite or with threats and swearing - they advise in different ways) demanding to remove the stolen content or put an active link to your site. Inform that in case of refusal, you will contact the hoster, the search engines, the court. They say it helps sometimes.
• If you could not find the owner of the site or he does not want to answer you, then write a detailed letter to his hosting provider about copyright infringement, indicating links to plagiarism and originals. Only without threats, but politely. If the hosting is not indifferent to its reputation, then the problem will be solved in your favor.
• Complain to Yandex if the thief's site ranks higher than yours. Perhaps it will be lowered in the search results or even thrown out of the search for this query. It is useless to complain to Platons about content theft. The answer is always the same - we do not deal with plagiarism, contact the hoster.
• You can file a complaint with Google at https://support.google.com/legal/ or https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard. I have not tried it myself, but there are cases when Google removed plagiarism from search results.
• If your content is found on Yukoz free hosting sites, then it is very easy to punish copy-pasteers. Enough and the site will be blocked.
• Go to court. But, you need to understand that it may not be worth it. Although if you have a large resource and you incur serious losses because of this, and there are experienced lawyers on staff and you have a lot of free time, then you can try.

In my case, everything turned out to be more complicated. There was no contact information on the thief's website and no opportunity to leave comments. Through Whois, I found some email, wrote a letter. Naturally, there was no answer. I didn’t complain anywhere, since my site is young with zero indicators and, moreover, is not indexed by Yandex. And the thief in authority is TIC 60 and PR 4, and the article has probably been in the index for a long time. So, who will be considered the author, I think there is no need to explain.

What did I do? I took advantage of one of the unofficial tips - spit on everything and rewrite the article. Otherwise, sanctions from the search engines could have been applied to me. And it doesn't matter to me at all. Of course, if a lot of content is stolen, then you can’t rewrite everything. But if one article, then it is not difficult.

How to protect yourself from content theft:

• Insert links to your pages in articles. If the text was taken away by an inexperienced plagiarizer or a robot, then the links will remain and will work for you, increasing the TIC and PR. Insert links at the beginning of the article - this can help against copy-paste if they steal from RSS.
• Use pictures in the text, where the tags will contain links to your site. You can add your logo to the image itself.
• Mention the name of your site in the articles, thereby advertising it.
• Leave hidden links to your pages, hiding them, for example, under periods and commas. Although, in my opinion, this advice is controversial, since search engines may not like it.
• With the help of scripts, make a ban on pressing the right mouse button or when trying to copy, display a window with a warning about the responsibility for copy-paste. Install copy protection plugins for WordPress, such as Wp-CopyProtect. But this is so, for the psychological impact on inexperienced thieves.

• Use the script from the www.tynt.com service. received after free registration script, install it on your blog. Now, when copying, along with the text, a link to the author's site will also be placed on the clipboard.
• If your site has TIC 10 or more, about the appearance of new articles using the “ original lyrics“. Texts of at least 2,000 characters are accepted. (Author's note. Since October 24, 2013, restrictions on the TIC have been lifted, and the minimum text size is 500 characters).
• Register your articles on copyscape.com services, or similar. Put one of their warning buttons in the “basement” for show off. Someone might be scared off.

, / from

What to do if content is stolen from your site?

Hello everyone, the other day I noticed that the content from my site began to appear on other sites. Sooner or later, everyone who blogs will face the problem of content theft from the site.

In this article, I will try to tell you in as much detail as possible what to do if the content from the site began to appear on other sites and, most importantly, how to prevent the theft of content from the site in advance.

By the way, in the program for creating and making money on your site (SDL), at one of the sessions, we analyze in detail how to stop the theft of content from the site. For those who want to make money on their site or create their own profitable site that will bring you good money every month - welcome to the SDL program.

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They steal content from the site, what to do?

So, you have discovered that content from your site has been copied and placed on another site. What harm can a content thief cause?

If your article is interesting, you will lose potential visitors. An article on your site may be mistaken for a duplicate, not the original. And if content theft is on a large scale, then your site may even be recognized by the search engine as a site with completely stolen content.

If the content was stolen from you, and at the same time they put a link to the original article, you should not worry. The original is indicated, and the search engine will easily find it out.

If your project is large enough and authoritative, then it’s not so scary if your content is stolen. Your site most likely already has a . That is, the level of trust in your site by search engines is high, the search engine will understand that the materials on your site are unique.

But, if you have a young site, and all the content on the site is unique, you need to take measures to prevent content theft. Otherwise, a site with stolen content may overtake your site.

Technical measures to prevent theft of content from the site.

You can also take some technical measures to prevent content theft. You can block the right-click of the mouse, you can also make sure that when copying material, a link to the original article gets into the clipboard.

There are also several ways to prevent content from being stolen from a site if the theft is done using special programs in automatic mode.

So your content has been stolen. What to do?

The easiest option is to contact the site owner. This can be done using the form feedback if available on the site. Or we are looking for the contact details of the site owner.

Next, please remove the content or put a link to the original article. If contact details are not indicated on the site, we contact the domain owner through the domain name registrar and find out information about hosting. To do this, we will use the domain information analysis service, for example - http://www.whois-service.ru.

Here we enter the address of the site that steals content from you. Next, information about the domain will be displayed. IN this case we see that the site provides CMS Ucoz. The owner information is hidden, but there is an "admin-contact" line.

Copy specified address to contact the domain administrator and send a message to the domain owner. We also found out the hosting of the site, that is, we can complain about the owner of the site to the hosting provider.

Reporting copyright content to Yandex

The Yandex search engine can be informed that unique content will soon appear on your site. To do this, use the service "Original texts". In order to use this service, the TIC index of your site must be at least 10.

Hello! The number of sites that steal articles from this one is growing day by day, and what is most offensive is this copy-paste, moreover (98% without an ACTIVE link) and what is most offensive, their copy-paste lives well in the index and there have been cases that rank higher than the original source - this blog.

So far, there is no time to deal with thieves and there is no time to write, but it can be useful to someone to consider how their copy-paste flies into the index. I will say right away that unique content on sites = 0, only copy-paste (both manual and parser). The age of sites is from 3 months, the design is usually cleaned up public.

The first thing that alerted me was the huge number of retweets to the post, which means that cross-posting to Twitter is underway in order to speed up indexing, and in case of any problems on my site, the speedbot did not index or the server went down for 15 minutes - their article The search engine will perceive it as original, and mine as a brazen copy-paste. But the matter was not limited, along the way, all the announcements of the articles went to the live journal. In a word, Twitter will speed up indexing in Google, and LiveJournal in Yandex.

I also noticed one interesting pattern on some blogs. These entries are commented on and moreover, all the time by some left accounts with installed . This means that another 1n parser is working, which collects comments on blogs (neutral) or contains its own base and posts them to each entry, thereby creating the appearance of a live blog and, as a result, winding up and increasing the trust of the site. But here they made a mistake, since they do everything from one IP and do not use proxies, through which many people love to visit the mirror in contact and other similar sites.

I think sooner or later the search engines will burn all this and the thieves will fly away under. Also, in order for everything to be indexed well, they use an internal linking plugin unknown to me (possibly written to order). Every second word is a link to another page. All this helps them in addition to receive traffic via.

And most importantly, some steal from 5-10 blogs at once, and this is apparently the best way for indexing. Copy-paste sits in the index remarkably. By the way, earlier they at least put an active link, but now they have stopped doing this and they just steal insolently.

So you see, copy-paste has the right to life if it is submitted correctly. But after the session, I think I'll start rolling abuses and make sure that the sites at least wander from hoster to hoster.

Have a nice day, everyone!