Overview:

As a web developer or a website owner its important to know the the laws and processes you can perform, to protect your online work from being copied, plagiarized.

Reality Check:

It is impossible to prevent it from occurring, but you can take precautions and make life harder for those that would attempt to illegally take your work.

How To Protect your:

  • General:

    • Paid:
      • U.S. Copyright: File your work with the U.S. Copyright Dept.
      • Lizard Lock: (Untested) Lizard Lock provides a service that will achieve:
        • pdf security, flash security, html security, ebook security, elearning security, and software copy control.  Stop copying, prevent printing, and control the sharing of your documents, ebooks, training courses, and web content. Protect documents inside and outside your organization, and instantly revoke access to your secure information at any stage.
      • Copysentry: An online service that for a monthly fee compares your work against what is on the web and alerts you if it finds matches.

  • Writing:

    • Online services you can use:
      • Free:
        • Google Alert: With Google Alerts you can specify keywords (things that pertain to your works) and when Google finds articles online that match those words, you receive an email alert notifying you about new content online that it. You can then read the pages provided and if there is an issue you can proceed as appropriate.
        • Digital Container: Digital container provides a secure method of selling, and distributing your content. However it enforces a few extra steps for your customer which you may want to take into consideration.

  • Photography, Art, Images, Graphics:

    • Image:
      • Upload a lower resolution image, so that it won’t look that good when printing.
      • Embed a water mark: Here is a great tutorial on how to do a water mark in Adobe Photoshop as well as how to automate it.
      • Use a flash image gallery.
    • Web Technology:
      • Prevent “Right Click”: disable the right click making it hard for users to copy the image.
        • Add this to your websites HTML BODY tag:   <body oncontextmenu=”return false;”>

  • Website:

    • Add copyright to the bottom of your page in one of the following forms:
      • (c) Name 2001
      • Copr. Name 2001
      • Copyright Name MMI

If you have other ideas about what can be done please post them here.