Plagiarism – And How To Prevent It

Written by Susan on January 28th, 2009

You’ve spent more time than you know you should have on getting a good, useful, meaningful bit of content on your blog or website.  After much thought, several drafts, and a tech glitch or two later, you’ve gotten a nice article written and posted, joining all the other articulate and thoughtful pieces of your heart, soul and experience that you’re sharing with the world.

Then someone comes along, steals it, and passes it off as their own. Ouch!

But it’s not just your time, expertise and hard work that’s taken a hit – it can affect your bottom line as well. Good content brings in traffic, and you want to be sure your own handcrafted words are bringing the traffic exactly where you want it - to your site. After all, people get paid to write articles, and you don’t want to give your time and talent away for free on anybody else’s terms but your own.

So I have some tips to help you keep on top of what’s happening to your content.

Firstly, there’s some debate on where the line between protecting your content and annoying the hell out of your visitors should really be drawn. There’s a plethora of free javascript code available to make sure a potential thief doesn’t have an easy time of stealing your text and images, but the fact remains that most of the people visiting your site are people you want to remain on good terms with! So making it impossible to right-click and save an image, for example, should only be used if you have proprietary images of your own that could potentially cost you income if copied. People rely on right-clicking to do a lot of things, and finding this handy tool has been disabled on your site is a guarantee that you’ve seen them for the last time. As for disabling the back button, well…you can just kiss goodbye to any potential customers there and then.

It’s even possible to make viewing the source code hard to do. But notice I didn’t say impossible. If someone is determined to steal your content, they will always find a way to do it – even someone with a modicum of tech savvy probably knows a way to get something they really want off your site.

So what can you do to protect yourself?

I recommend you visit Copyscape, a free service that lets you type in your URL and find out where else on the web your material might be showing up. You can get banners for your site, warning that you are paying attention to what happens to your content. They also provide lots of good information on what constitutes plagiarism, what the laws are regarding it, and what recourse you have if you find yourself a victim of it. They also have a premium (paid) service that will allow you a more powerful and unlimited search of the web for your content – not just your URL, but cut-and-pasted text from your site you’d like researched.

Personally, I do like to use a code that at least prevents people from highlighting and copying text from some of my sites. If you’d like to get a copy of that code for your own site, comment and I’ll be happy to send it along! Just beware, it could impede the ability of people to fill out any opt-in forms you may have, so just use this on sites or pages where you don’t have such a thing.