Protecting your work online, be it a blog, or web page from being stolen is important. I’ve even had people copy my articles I post here, to forums, not realizing they aren’t permitted. The first, and most important thing is helping to educate others. Share how taking content off of anyone’s web page, blog, or forum without the owners permission is against the law. As a parent I find myself telling my children over, and over again, and again to ask, never take anything even one sentence.
The second thing you should do to protect your work online from being stolen is copyright it. There are several ways you can go about copyrighting your web page, or blog. The easiest, and cheapest is adding your own copyright to each and every page, or entry. If you can’t be bothered to do this, or don’t know how, you could go with My Free Copyright. My Free Copyright provides you with an easy to get to online proof of your copyright should you need to report a website, blog, or forum for stealing your hard work.
The third thing you should do is use Copyscape on your web page. Copyscape is a great easy to use, free website that will show you any website, forum or blog that has your content upon it. I highly recommend adding the banner to your work online, with their link. When you place that banner and link upon your work online, it will help educate others.
The fourth most cleverest thing to do is, on pages that contain your work, use the same color as your background and place hidden copyrighted text. This copyrighted text will only appear when highlighted. Most people who steal other’s content, don’t even pay attention to that, and when contacting the host of the web page, forum, or blog should your copyright be there it will be shut down.
The fifth thing you could do is add a Java Script code preventing copy and paste. If you have a free blog, that’s not an option. However if you own your own domain it is. You could also add the script that prevents the mouse from highlighting your page to copy too. There is also a right click disable script. It all depends how far you are willing to go to prevent your work online from being stolen.
Maintain copies of your work, this way if it’s deleted, reposted at a later date, you still have it, and when it was copyrighted. It’s important to have complete records should you need to go to court. The only time I’ve encountered going to court over copyrighted information not being removed is when dealing with Google and it’s subsidiaries. Google doesn’t believe in following the letter of copyright law.