Online Copyright – How do you Protect Online Content ? – Part II

There are a few simple steps you can take proactively to reduce the chance that your online content will be copied without your permission.

1) Don’t ever copy an entire article from any web site to your web site. Protect yourself from being flagged as some who plagiarizes just as you would not want to be plagiarized. In other words, practice what you preach.

Excerpts are usually acceptable, (50 words or so), if a link to the original post or page is included. If there is any question, contact the writer of the original work.

Seek professional legal counsel if you have questions that you think might have any legal ramification.

2) Use a standard copyright with the (copyright symbol), (the year), (the title of your web site or blog), All rights reserved. (the title of your page or post). Most WordPress plugins will put this information in the footer at the bottom of each post.

I use a WordPress plugin called Simple Feed Copyright. It automatically puts a copyright line into the last line of the footer on all RSS feeds from this site.

3) Do a Google search for your company and your name in quotes. This will show most, (not all), of the locations where your name appears. This is a way to check not only on legitimate but illegitimate uses of your name.

Any mention of your company or your name should appear in the listing. If someone were to attribute content to you that you did not write, this will come up as well. This will cover all current and past results.

4) Use Google Alerts. You can enter up to 32 words into a search. Choose a key section of your post or article. Google will send you an e-mail alert whenever those words appear on the Internet.

You can check the reported content to see if it was only that section or the entire post that was copied. If someone took that section of the report, and made changes to it, however, you would not receive an alert.

It does work very well to check and see if anyone is reusing your content fairly, or unfairly without permission. If you submit the alert on the same day as the post. it will be easy to reference the alert when it comes up.

Google alerts do not access historical data, like a Google search, only forward from the date on which they are set up.

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Tagged as: Google Alert, Online Copyright, RSS