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The question of web content protection has always been very acute because you can hardly find a website that is secure from unauthorized copying of content or, calling a spade a spade, plagiarism. “Pirates of the XXI century” are on the alert and are anxious to copy every high-quality website right up to the very last letter. How is web content protection performed? How to protect your website content and punish offenders?
In theory web content protection is provided in accordance with the Law on Copyright and Related Rights. However, in practice these legislative requirements are far from being observed by everyone, and it seems that is not possible to punish offenders. Site owners have to search for alternative methods of web content protection in order to protect their unique content from unauthorized copying.
There are different methods of web content protection depending on the type of content (text or multimedia). For example, watermarks are widely used to protect unique images. To protect text content web developers disable text selection or right mouse click on websites. These methods of protection are quite simple and are able to drive off only the laziest content thieves whose modus operandi is “copy and paste”. Besides, they irritate common site visitors.
Search engines also contribute their mite into the struggle against unauthorized copying of content because the quality of web search cannot be high until duplicate content has better rankings in the search engine results than the original one. For example, Yandex search engine provides webmasters with an opportunity to let the search engine know beforehand about forthcoming emergence of unique original texts on websites.
You should use a special form in Yandex.Webmaster: paste the original text of the article which you are going to publish on your website into this form. The text is uploaded in the “plain” form, without HTML tags. As soon as your request is accepted you can publish the text on your website – now Yandex web crawlers will consider it the original. Even if your content is stolen offenders will not benefit from it.
There are less popular methods of web content protection. For example, one of the most original (and even bizarre) methods is the use of “mixed” letters. According to a number of scientific researches, a man can read words even when all letters (except the first and the last one) are in the wrong places. The authors of this method of web content protection suggest that you should publish text content in such a form (with mixed letters), and plagiarists won't copy it. However, it is obvious that such texts have a very negative influence on promotion of your site in such engines and attitude of the target visitors.
Unfortunately, none of the described methods can guarantee 100% web content protection: there is always a chance that unprincipled plagiarists will copy original images and texts from your site. However, if you didn't manage to protect your website content from stealing, you still can try to protect your copyright and punish the offenders.
You can bring an action for infringement of copyright and related rights against the offenders. However, consideration of the case may take much time, and it is very difficult to gather required evidence base. Therefore you can inform search engines and domain name registrar against the site which contains duplicate content. If your complaints are justified, the site will become unavailable for the visitors.
TAGS
web content protection,
website content protection,
protect your website content,
copyright infringement |
copywriting 
