How to protect your Web content from copyright infringement and plagiarism

Table of Contents

Case #

You have a Web site on which you publish content, such as blog, podcast or other personal or business site. You find out that certain other sites are performing copyright infringement and plagiarism of your Web content by unlawfully copy pasting content to gain profit and to affect your searching engine SEO ranking. This article provides guidance on how to protect your Web content from copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Stefanos Cloud

Solution #

The act of copy pasting content from another source verbatim without mentioning the content source is called plagiarism. There are strict terms and rules about plagiarism which covers the content operated by all Web hosting providers.

First off, you should protect your content adequately to avoid having it stolen in the first place. In the case of WordPress, this can occur either by adding custom PHP code to your blog for disabling text selection or by installing a copyright protection plugin, such as the following: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-content-copy-protector/. You can also use the CopyScape online tool to detect infringed copies of your original content: .

If nevertheless your content is stolen, either by some automated bot using content scraping processes or manually by human, you should take following actions:

  1. First send an email to the infringing party, notifying them of the infringement and ask them to immediately take down the infringed content.
  2. If the party does not comply, you must take action via DMCA take-down notice. A DMCA Takedown Notice is a type of legal document which lays out how two parties can handle the theft and subsequent online publication of copyrighted content or copyright infringement. A DMCA Takedown Notice gets its name from a section of the US Copyright Act called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA specifically addresses copyright violation and enforcement over the internet. More details about how to initiate a DMCA notice can be found at: https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/How-can-I-file-a-DMCA-Takedown-Notice.
  3. Report an Adsense and Google search violation to Google, as per the following instructions: https://support.google.com/adsense/troubleshooter/1190500?hl=en and https://support.google.com/adsense/contact/violation_report.

You may nee to consider taking additional precautionary steps for securing your online content, such as training course videos, by following hints provided at https://stefanos.cloud/kb/how-to-protect-your-videos-from-downloading/.

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