copyrighting.jpgEach time that you publish a new blog post, you own the exclusive rights to that material. Anyone that copies or tries to copy your material without getting permission is accountable under United States law, you do hold the right to sue. In most cases, if someone happens to steal your content, it isn’t worth your time or money to track them down and file a lawsuit. There are many decisions you need to make when it comes to copyrighting. This blog entry will help you get a better idea of what copyrighting blog content entails and what you should do if someone steals your content.

Free links to your website

In most cases, the person that takes material, will link to your website. I am fine with people linking to articles on my website within their blog posts, but when someone steals an entire article, it makes me a little bit upset. Luckily, no one has yet copied my material from this blog and reposted it on their blog. Content theft has happened on a couple articles from my other blogs. One popular article is all it takes for people to get the brilliant idea that they should copy your entire article and repost it on their blog. When hundreds of people end up linking to a single blog post, it’s tough to figure out which websites happen to be stealing your content.

Don’t be afraid, don’t waste your time

There are a number of reasons that your best bet is to not waste your time with copyrighters. First of all, google does not like duplicate content — the site that stole your content will be penalized. Second, most sites that do steal your content aren’t even worth tracking down and contacting for a lawsuit. When I see a “.blogspot” blog that is comprised of all stolen posts, I know that the site is going absolutely nowhere and not going to be successful — it’s not worth the time or effort to track them down. There is really nothing to be afraid of with stolen content. Your site will still rank number one on Google for that article because you were the first publisher. All the other outliers that ‘jacked your article will most likely be penalized by search engines anyways. As of now, I don’t feel it is even worth the time to track down content thieves.

What you can do to ensure that your content is copyrighted

If you are absolutely positive that you want your works to be copyrighted, I’d check in to one of the following sites:

  • www.copyright.gov — A drawback with using this site is that you can only copyright 50 pages, if your material is longer than 50 pages, you cannot use it.
  • www.digistamp.com — Digistamp is a “timestamp” service is only 40 cents per timestamp, which is fairly cheap!
  • www.surety.com — Surety is also a “timestamp” service that charges around $1.50 per timestamp

Check out each of these sites to see which one you think will work best for your blog. It’s all based on personal preference and what will work best to copyright your material.

If you are worried about copyrighting your RSS feeds, check out these plugins:

  • Feed Footer WordPress Plugin — This is the plugin that I currently use to copyright my feed. It works out great, is easy to install, and gets my approval.


Why copyright or timestamp?

Copyrighting or timestamping provide an added layer of security to your works. Using services like this for your blog will make you feel safer about your content and will help keep your blog protected from theft. Timestamping allows us to prove and verify the date and time of when a digital document was created. Both timestamping and copyrighting are valuable tools that can be utilized to protect your works.

To find out if your material has been copied

To find out if someone has hijacked your webpage content, you can do a couple specialized searches. These searches should give you fairly good results and help you get a good idea as to whether or not someone has not even given you credit for your material.

The searches that I recommend using are:

  • Copyscape.com — At copyscape.com, you simply type the URL of your website into the search bar, and copies of your articles and website materials will show up in the results. If someone did happen to copy your blog article, it will probably show up here. There is a premium version that you can buy for better results… There is also a free “plagiarism warning banner” that you can put on your website to let your readers and visitors know that your pages are protected and that they should not copy! To me, this reminds me of the “ADT” signs that people put in their yards — even though “ADT” may not be installed, seeing the sign probably will scare the burglar, or in this case a potential copier, away!
  • Google.com — This powerful search engine can also be utilized to search for copies of your posts. Here’s how you can find out if someone else has similar posts. Take one of your post titles, or key sentences in posts that you might think are plagiarized and search for them on google. The you will want to enclose the title or key sentences in parenthesis. Take a close look at the results. What did you find? Did a random .blogspot blog hijack your content?

There are probably other methods which you can use to find stolen content; using Copyscape and plain ole Google search have worked best for me.

What action should you take if you find stolen content

Theres actually quite a bit you should know if you want to deal with stolen content. If you feel that you should take action and that a valuable piece of work was stolen from your website here’s what you should do: Read the article entitled: “What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content” written by Lorelle on Wordpress.

“Ain’t no stressin”: Uncopyright?

Leo, the owner and webmaster of ZenHabits.net, has released an “uncopyright” on all of his works. His uncopyright page — that I recommend you check out — tells his readers: “Feel free to steal my content.” He doesn’t care if you re-copy one of his entire posts on your blog or make a book out of his works. Why would anyone use an “uncopyright?” To be honest, I think Leo wants his message to impact others more than anything. He also knows that if his posts are republished, he will still be the number one ranked site in Google for that post. Search engines also do not like duplicate content, so my guess is that the copied version of the post would be punished by Google. Leo says that he’d definitely like some credit if you use his material, but there really “ain’t no stressin” at ZenHabits when the content is copied.

My final thoughts towards Copyrighting and Uncopyrighting

I do not allow other website’s to full out copy my material. Maybe a day will come when I will change my mind, but for now, everything on AndrewPavelski.com belongs to Andrew Pavelski. I don’t at all mind if you link to my website articles that you found interesting — in fact, I am happy to see other sites link to my articles. Not everyone is as lenient as Leo, and you need to be the judge as to what works best to fit your blogging needs and interests.

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