Creating and maintain a quality website is a tedious job; even more difficult is to write and manage content for that website.

Most of the web developers put in a great deal of energy and time in developing quality content for their web site. But they are not aware of thousands of other people who are using content from their web sites without permission.

Organizations that provide websites with confidential information often face the issues of protecting the information and the html source codes that accompany it from being copied by an unauthorized user.

Without providing protection, unauthorized users can simply use their browser’s temporary files to determine what files are unprotected and their source. At any moment, anyone in the world can copy your online content and instantly paste it onto their site.

After making minor changes, they will claim your content as their own. In defending your rights online against plagiarists, it’s important to be both vigilant and proactive. In this article we would discuss how one can protect a website from plagiarism.

Place a copyright mark:
You must demonstrate your copyright notice on each page of your web site. This notice should have the year of publication and also the name of your firm. This information could also be displayed in a graphic pasted in the footer of the page. You can copyright your content by using services like http://www.creativecommons.org. Simply visit this website and register a free account and show a Copyright message in your website to prevent scrapers from copying your blog contents.

Use CopyScape:
Copyscape is another tool that helps you to find your website content on the whole web. There are two packages in copyscape, Free and Paid. You can either search your website content OR your website links to find duplicate contents. It will provide you all the details about your blog content. If someone has copied your website content copyscape will provide you all the links.

Use PDF files:
More usage of password-protected PDF files would prevent people from blatant copy and paste of your web content. Although the more experienced thieves could make use of several password recovery software available to break through the protected PDFs and copy the content. You can also convert your text into images; it’s a very effective solution unless someone types it from your website. Embedding images in java script of flash also makes them less vulnerable.

Disable Right-Click:
Disabling right-click is a very effective method of preventing someone from copying your content. Below is the source code to prevent right click option.

//distributed by http://hypergurl.com
var popup=" right-click is disabled. This Site Copyright ©2000";
function noway(go) { if (document.all) { if (event.button == 2){ alert(popup);
return false; } if (document.layers) { if (go.which == 3) { alert(popup); return false; } } } if
(document.layers) { document.captureEvents(Event.MOUSEDOWN); } document.onmousedown=noway;

Web page cloaking:
Page cloaking is “invented” to protect web page content from competition. One version (optimized for search engine position) is delivered to search engine spiders, and other (not optimized) to visitors and other spiders (including competitors). User agent, and/or spider IP is used to spot search engine spiders.

Now, thieves are using cloaking to protect “their” stolen content. If caching is enabled, redirection is used, so, before cached page is loaded, you are redirected to some affiliate link. Caching (on search engine) can be disabled, but without good reason, that is suspicious and small numbers of hijackers are using that.
I don’t want to suggest that web page cloaking is good to use. If your base of spiders IP is not refreshed often, it could happen that search engine spider, visiting from some new IP, find that your page is not the same. And you are in trouble.

Web page cloaking (or IP delivery) could be used against well known content scrapers. Just give them some “nice looking page” instead of your real content. Add some unusual text to that page, so you can find that easy on search engines to find where your special page is hosted.

Use Links:
Most of the scrappers use automated scrapping tools that would scrap content from your post and RSS feeds. Use a link in each of your post titles so each of the post even scrapped would link it to your original content.

Avert hot linking:
Most of the times content scrappers are harmless since they won’t steal you search engine ranking nor your visitors, but it can be a threat if they are copying images from your website and using it on theirs. It means that the original image would be hosted on your server and every time that image is displayed on a scrapper’s webpage, it would be accessed from your server, resulting in waste of your bandwidth. The process is called hotlinking. To prevent this you can use the following code in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/2806/hotlink.gif [L]

There are some other technical solutions to the problem; some of them are listed below:
- Encrypt HTML and hide html source code.
- Disable offline use, prevent “save as” function to save image.
- Set No Cache, the web page will not saved to Browser’s inside Cache, so can’t find any pictures or files in the IE or Navigator internet temp files cache directory.
- Fully disable the right mouse-click context menu, now the visitor can’t select the Pictures to save, or find out the links’s address.
- Disable text and picture highlight select, Disable image Drag drop
- Disable Image Tools Bar in IE6
- Hide display links and address and messages in status bar
- Disable Smart Tags in IE6 or higher.
- Disable Web pages printed. When it is printed it will appear blank.

Use content security software:
Many software are available in market that would protect your content against unauthorized copying and would protect your confidential data as well. Some sophisticated web content security software provide a way for the content to be decrypted to memory instead of using temporary offline files which are more vulnerable. The decryption keys are distributed to authorized persons only.

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