How to Protect Copyrighted Content

You write an excellent article. Post it on your website. It comes up well on top search engines. After sometime you find similar articles quoting part or full content of your article as theirs without any credit to you!

What do you do?

Search Engine watch has an excellent article describing what to do if your original content gets copied.
In short they advise to follow this order -

1. Send a Cease & Desist (C&D) email (about legal stuff etc.) stating the content must be removed within 48 to 72 hours and send it to every single email address you can find.

2. Contact the web hosting companies which have a strict policy against publishing copyrighted content. Sometimes it works.

3. Contact the top search engines to get those listings removed in provisions with the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) if nothing else works.

Read their full article for details.

What can you do?
You can use Copyscape to find copied content, and also put up a “Do Not Copy” banner on your site. Creative Commons offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” copyright. Or use the All rights reserved and copyright statement clearly displayed on your site.

The US Copyright Office has some good stuff regarding protection for the works of authors. More interesting reading is the 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.