Feb | 21 | 2008

Protecting Your Blog Content

I don’t think I have ever had this experience but I am sure that a lot of other bloggers have had their content copied in full at one point or another. I know that it is quite acceptable to quote other people’s written work in blogs as long as you mention your source yet it is another story altogether if someone copies your work word for word and then claims it as his own. In short, that is plagiarism.

Since there are no specific and stringent laws with regard to copyright of blogs as of yet (or maybe I am not aware of them), how do you go about protecting your work? Personally, I am not averse to people quoting what I write or even using the whole entry – again as long as they mention the source. Still, there are those who may not want to do that so there is no choice but to protect your work from those kinds of people.

I got some cool ideas from Stephen Pratley in his blog:

1. Show excerpts in your feed. Don’t put the whole entry in there. This will make it a bit harder for people who want to rip your whole blog off. Of course, on the downside, it might make it harder for readers to read the whole entry as well.

2. Use this code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/replace.jpg [R,L]

According to Pratley:

What this will do is replace all your images with one called replace.jpg which you can have a lot of fun with. I tend to do this on a case by case basis to screw up people who are using my bandwidth to serve images without permission. A big banner with ‘stolen from stephenpratley.com‘ works nicely.

I think the second option would work really well – and give you some good fun while at it!

3 Responses

Aaron B. Hockley
22|Feb|2008

Partial (excerpt) feeds suck.

What’s more important, annoying a potential splogger, or not pissing off your actual readers?
Jimmy
08|Mar|2008

You’ve got a point. I suppose it depends on one’s priority. I’d choose your second option, though.
LINDA mORRIS
31|Dec|2008

Hi i dont know if im posting in the right place ,but could you please help me ,i cant acces my multiply page as a message pops up and says that my account is sussprnded .I dont know who to contact to ask why .thanks so much

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