Don’t Let Them Steal You Blind!
We’ve painstakingly selected the best images for our online galleries, but now are paranoid of visitors pilfering them from our websites. As any good photographer would do, we spend all our energy watermarking, downsampling and finding alternative methods such as using flash for keeping the cyber thieves at bay, all along totally neglecting one of the obvious morsels of potential website theft, our textual content!
You’ve spent days handcrafting and fine tuning your website content and the last thing you want to do is find your bio on somebody else’s website with only the name changed or you latest earth shattering blog post on your competitors blog.
Fellow photographer Mark Robert Halper states:
As often as several times a week I discover other photographers who have taken the text from my site and used it on their own. This includes not only web optimization language, but branding language, capabilities language, marketing language, and even personal quotes of mine they attribute to themselves. There have also been instances of design theft, as well as actual image theft. Paraphrasing my ideas is also rather common, when they know better than to copy word for word (both are plagiarism).
Not only do we have to worry about people stealing our images, we now have to worry about them taking our content as well, it’s no wonder anyone wants to operate a website.
As a photographer doing business on the internet, there are a few services and software programs out there that can help us detect whether or not someone is using our content, or protect the copy we’ve worked so hard to create.
One such services is www.Copyscape.com, which offers both Free and Paid For service.
According to the Copyscape website.
The free Copyscape service makes it easy to find copies of your content on the Web. Simply type in the address of your web page, and Copyscape does the rest. Copyscape finds sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you.
Copyscape Premium provides more powerful searching than the free service with no monthly limit. You may also search for copies of your offline content by copying and pasting the text.
There are also software based tools that will help not only protect your content but your websites code as well. PageLock by Multimedia Australia allows you to encode your website pages in such a way that it makes copying code and content very difficult. This is a Windows only based program.
Artistscope offer a host of tools that allow you to protect your copy as well as pdf files and images from the more savvy cyber-thief, who typically bypasses your so called failsafe flash galleries, they go as far as disabling the thief’s screen capture abilities.
These are just a few offerings that can help get you on your way to sleeping more soundly at night. Doing a simple google search for “website copy protection” will yield a host of others if you find these don’t fit your needs.
