How to copyright & protect your blog content?
I am sharing what I have learned so far however your inputs are really important to keep internet free from spam. Please feel free to post your comments/inputs to help each other finding a solution to this problem.
Internet is full of spam and a bunch of lazy bloggers are stealing your content everyday. This happens to me you and every one who is posting good content. The question is How to solve this problem and keep our content unique to invite Google to index it under positive titles. In this post I will discuss about some precautions and solutions to this problem.
While writing on any topic, a blogger does a lot of research on the topic he/she is going to write about and It’s not at all wrong if we are not copying and pasting the content to fill out some space on our website.
In today’s demanding world its getting very difficult for bloggers to write on unique topics. The worst part, I have seen a lot of blogs where bloggers don’t care to include their own views on the topic. They simple copy and paste first few lines of another blog and then provide a link to read the full story without permission.
There are some spamming websites with hell lot of ads which display articles from different blogs with scripts to post via RSS feed. They don’t even care about what the topic is about. The spamming scripts are doing the good job for them.
Some of us might think positive about this fact and might think – “What’s the harm if I am getting a back link from that website, its good for SEO. Isn’t is?”
If you think the same way, I recommend you to think over once again. In my opinion, this is not at all positive approach because your content is being copied to a different web site which is not recommended. Google bots don’t like duplicate content and these websites are helping your content to get indexed as duplicate content. It’s possible that Google mark these websites as “Spam” and you have a track back link in your comments. The problem is you are linking to a penalized website and Google will take care of this, while indexing your website.
The Solution
The solution to this syndrome is very simple, we need to prepare ourselves to keep our content unique. We can follow these steps to ensure the originality of our conent.
Copyright The Content: The most important step is to copyright the content of your blog or website and this is pretty easy to do. Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) is a non-profit organization which let authors, developers, artists, publishers and educators to copyright their contnent and link to a detailed copyright page that can be used in the legal proceedings. To know more about this free service you can visit their official website or vist the FAQ’s page where you will get answers to most common questions.
Finding Stolen Content: Another issue is how will You be notified that your content is being stolen by someone?
Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) is a well known solution for this issue. You can create alerts with key phrases you are using in your content and Google will send you an email with the link to the website where that particular phrase is published “anywhere” on the internet. Try this service and I am sure you will write a love letter to Google. 
Google Blog Search: You can use Google Blog Search to find out duplicate copies of the content. To use it in an effective way follow the steps below:
1. Open the http://www.google.com/blogsearch. 2. Copy some text from your own article and paste it in the search box in double quotes and hit the search button. 3. You will have the results on the page from different websites including your own website.
Note: To get best results from Google blog Search copy the text from two lines for e.g: “..some words from the first line. Some words from the second line..”
CopyScape.com is another service you can use to find out duplicate content, however I have realized that it has lagged behind in having its database updated, however we can give it a shot.
Removing Stolen Content: Let’s assume you have received an email from Google Alerts about the phrase used on a particular website. What to do next? In most cases you will not find any contact info on the website about the administrator because that jerk knows he is stealing and violating the terms of use.
You can use WHOIS Lookup service to find detailed info about the owner of that website but I am pretty sure he has set the Domain Privacy “ON” to keep his info unpublished however, you will get an email id similar to privacy-546494@domainprivacygroup.com which will forward your email to the admin of that website.
You can write an email to this email id with a notice to remove your content from the website including a link to your Creative Commons copyright page. In most cases your content will be removed from the site by administrator to avoid any leagal consequences. If that’s not the case you can use the following service to report forgery.
Google Safe Browsing: Once again thanks to Google for providing such services to help us browse safe. If you are unable to contact the website owner you can report it to Google and raise a request to remove content from its index. Google will check the website for the concern raised and will make sure to ban that website from its index. Mostly these websites use Google AdSense to earn some money and Google will ban their account due to Copyright Violation. (Updated the link as per info provided by Abhinav Sood in comments)
This way we can protect our content from being copied and increase the chance to be unique on the Google Index that will result in high page ranks and more organic traffic.
I hope the above information was helpful, if you have something to share please provide your inputs in the comments below and feel free to spread awareness on this topic by sharing it with your friends.
UPDATE
I got a real-time example for this post after just five minutes of publishing this post. Please notice the name of the author of this post. I am going to follow the steps I have listed above. 
Stolen Content
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Thanks for sharing. This is for sure going to be a great help for me. Anyways, I am waiting on some tutorials about wordpress/css. Hope you get time to write a few of them and share it with us.
Thanks for sharing the info.will certainly be helpful as am a newbie
Nice article, Mohit. I am worried about so many scraper sites coming up each day – and I notice so ,many spam pingbacks caught up in my Akismet Spam folder… I don’t approve them for display on my blog but they are still on the internet and that troubles me.
I have tried writing to a couple of scraper site owners but it hasn’t been good. And, Google Safe Browsing page that you linked to above lets us report phishing sites – sites that are designed to look like some other service with an intent to steal personal information. I don’t think it would be wise to report scraper sites as phishing pages.
What do you say?
Abhinav Soods last blog post..Archiving or Saving your Instant Messenger Chats for Reference
@Abhinav, Thanks for the feedback and the link is rectified.
Appreciate your share thanks !!
Abhisheks last blog post..Google Digg Deal explained ??
I agree with your post. Which is not something I will usually do!
I enjoy reading a post that will make one think. Also, thanks for allowing me to comment!
Thanks for the post. I’m forever seeing the phrase “…wrote an interesting post…” in my pingbacks.
Just to say, everything you write is automatically copyrighted. Adding a CC license does make it clear, but it’s not essential legally speaking.
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This is really good information. When I get to that point with my blog, I will be using these tips. Thanks again man!
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As I started to read the post I didn’t think there was anything that could be done if people are stealing content. The google alerts are a good idea (although probably time consuming to set them all up), but reporting to google safe browsing is something I didn’t know about, and that is a great idea. I agree with one of the above comments though that I don’t think that a CC license is absolutely neccessary . . . but it can’t hurt!
really informative article. I came to knew about from abhinav.
I too licensed my blog now to get rid of spammers
Mohit,I’m working on finding ways to protect content on blogs.I’m including a link back to your informative post,hope you don’t mind.
@yasmeen: Please go ahead and I appreciate that you consider my post.
Thanks
I think the simple solution is not to allow track-back links to these sites. Google is normally quite good at working out which is the duplicate so not too much to worry about there. Informing Google about the adsense on the other site is a great idea though.
This is something I hadn’t really though about but it makes perfect sense. Every blogger should be copywriting their information.
thanx mohit ,
i was looking for sumthing like ..my blog has been already been copied over 50 times and it irritates the hell out of me ..anyway thanx for that valuable info
Hi Mojit,
This is a very interesting post you have here. I wonder if you or any of your readers have encountered http://www.myfreecopyright.com or http://copyrightdeposit.com. I am interested in this kind of service and I am currently reviewing my options. Would also like to know if you know of similar sites offering the same service. Any comments you have would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Thanks Mohit for such a detailed information. I wanted to copyright my piece of writing and was looking for copyright information. Good i stumbled to your site. This info is really very helpful and I don’t have to dig in further. Thanks again.
Regards
Megha
My Blog with stories and thoughts – fullofcherries.blogspot.com/
Thank you very much for this information. I will us your protect guide.