I am preparing to write 40+ articles to my new iPod site. They would be my main source of content on the site. What are steps I should take to ensure that no one will copy them?
I've got a little script which disallows people right clicking on your website but you can't stop people taking the content from your site if they really want to do it.
Don't publish them. Lock them in a safe in your home and forget the combination. That's not 100% secure, but it's close. There's no need to right-click to copy content. Just view the source of the document. Also that stuff doesn't work with all browsers and is easy to get around anyway. If the articles are solid and worth it, spend the cash to register them. It will give you added ammunition should you need to take legal action.
There's nothing you can do. Once your site is done and up, anybody can view the source, copy and paste, and have the same site.
Everyone is right. There is just nothing you can do about it. The best thing is publish good content on your site, get alot of backlinks to your site. If you establish you site as the authority site for your topic people will know what you have written and the quality of the information. stavra
Exactly - but while right clicking doesn't mean the content is secure, it will actually stop a large percentage of the lazy people who can't be bothered creating their own content. Throw in a few red herrings such as comments in the middle of the text <!--fseo--> and such so that if they do copy the source they'll have a bit of work to do to get rid of rock solid evidence that it is your content. I could write you a script which will insert a comment between every word which means it won't effect the website display but if someone wants to copy the text they would have to do a lot of editing to get rid of your comments. At the end of the day there's nothing to stop someone just rewriting everything on your site if they really want to reproduce your content. The threat of legal action just doesn't seem to bother a lot of people who blatantly plagiarise other peoples work.
CopySafe pro will help you to protect both your images and web copy. But as you've already said that will not prevent somebody from rewriting it or something like that. For further details and info you can read here.
That can be really obnoxious to readers though. If I see a site disables right-clicking, I never go back to that site. I hate it. When I open a link, I always right-click and have it open in a new tab to bypass whatever settings the site has set. If a site owner wants to make my life difficult by being annoying b/c they're paranoid or too lazy to protect their work in other ways, then they don't need my visits... that's the way I see it. A site should always be built for readers first, and anything else comes afterwards.
You could put comments in yes. However, a quick couple lines of PHP code, for instance, will remove them all instantly. Run the article through the function and presto, comments are gone.
What are these other ways people are too lazy to use? Maybe, like me, they just don't know about them. Why does stopping right-clicking constitute paranoia? Once you've had your work stolen, as mine just was, is it paranoia to think it will happen again?
You should never make attempts at protecting your work online in ways that are going to be a hassle or annoyance for the specific people that your information is trying to reach. There are legal processes in place, and it's really not difficult to track stolen content. Setting up a simple alert for a unique phrase in your content through Google or Yahoo for example will let you know automatically if your work appears elsewhere (and make it a vital phrase that wouldn't likely be able to be rewritten). Then you learn how to write a cease and desist letter. It rarely has to go beyond that. My work is stolen all the time. But you can't obsess over it. It's life, and if you want to write on the Web, you have to get used to it, and have a plan of recovery. Prevention will never stop all theives, and like I said, certain methods just piss off readers, which is the last thing you should be wanting to do. They shouldn't be "punished" because of a few ignorant people stealing content. I'm sorry to hear your work was stolen, but I can pretty much guarantee you that it will happen again. Just get into the right mindframe, and prepare for dealing with it using methods like I stated, b/c if they really want it, they'll steal it even if they have to retype the whole thing or hire some cheap "writer" to do it for them.
You could make every comment unique which would mean find/replace wouldn't be any use. Nevertheless, the point I'm making is that if you're worried about someone stealing your content, make it harder for them to copy it without leaving a trail from you. I personally don't like the right click thing either jhmattern but some people find that their content is so precious they need to put everything in the way of someone stealing it. At the end of the day if someone wants to copy it they can just write it out again from the screen.
What was stolen was something I wrote for someone. He paid for the article, and he's more unhappy about it than I am. I see your point about not annoying site visitors. I'm interested in this Google alert thing, so I will look into that. I tried using Google to check something that I know is in two places, legally, and only found one. I'm wondering how reliable using a google search really is.
If you just did a basic search you may not have found everything. Things will take some time to get indexed, but it'll happen, and the alerts tell you the minute it's in there. When you setup an alert, be sure to set it to check not only regular results, but also blogs and news.
Don't rely on Google. They don't index everything (visible) and they are slow. If the site in question is new, it (the offending page) may take months to show if it does at all. Use MSN as well as Yahoo and perhaps even another SE. I use G-alerts like they are going out of style. There are so many business uses for them.