How to protect your online content from copying and hacking

There are many ways to see content copied and reproduced on another site without any consent from the owner. And as many are the defenses, one on all the others.

Content is one of the most valuable elements for your online reputation.

Whether it’s for an individual or a company, it doesn’t matter: valuable content will make all the difference in the eyes of web users, no longer satisfied with poor material, clickbaits and SEO stuff.

Just like readers of novels are always ready to discover a new book full of passion and emotion, able to immerse anyone in that world. Or that it is a good film, a play, a video game and a thousand other forms of production.

A valuable content is always recognizable.

However, the difference between all these and an Internet site is made by the net, where the material created in theory is personal property, but in practice once published it enters the hands of anyone.

And the problems of their digital work unfortunately do not end here: they have just begun.

The digital Far West

There are several factors that can affect your work. From the less serious ones that can be solved with an email to those that end up in court. They can be:

• generic appropriation of work belonging to third parties;
• copyright violation;
• content against the law;
• online cloning and piracy.

One can well understand that the issue is not simply the publication of an info-graphics taken from another blog. Beyond the surface there are in fact much more serious cases that require the intervention of the police.

Faced with these phenomena you need to have the right weapons to know how to prevent, defend and, if necessary, counterattack.

We at ReputationUP have been working in this field for over 10 years and we have experienced every type of situation, with tangible results. We know how to protect all online content of our customers from any form of theft and illegality.

Let’s go and see in detail what can be achieved without the right digital-immune defenses, up to the worst scenario of bankruptcy.

Ctrl+C –> Ctrl+V

The two most commonly used keyboard shortcuts in computer history are copy/paste.

This method means simply copying or downloading content such as an article (such as this one), a picture or image, a video and in general any component of a website.

Once in possession of this material, the person can now republish it on the web in the most convenient way for him:

• on their own website/blog/social;
• resell it to a private/company.

In any scenario, the real creator of the piece will never be mentioned and will certainly not receive any benefit from these operations. You will be robbed of what you have done.

And often without even knowing it. Because once that data content has been republished on the Internet, there will certainly be no notification of the fact. At least, not always.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF

1. Google Alert

You can set an Alert for the title or text parts of what you want in case they are republished.

Be careful, however, not to confuse the pure copy with the treatment of the same topic; if another page had taken inspiration from your content, everything would be fine.

2. Barriers

There are ways to make life more difficult for those who want to follow the path of theft. These are not inviolable systems, but ways that discourage the practice, because it would take time and work to get the material.

The first is the watermark, valid for videos and images. This is a transparent, but visible, symbol/written logo embedded within the product itself as a background, obviously referring to your brand or site. It is easily applicable by an image editor, but very difficult to remove without the matrix.

For the text there are instead mechanisms to prevent the selection and copying of each written area. An example is WP-CopyProtect, a WordPress tool that avoids the plagiarism of text material, whether they are articles or components of the site itself.

Another example for images is another WordPress plug-in, No Right Click Images Plugin, which as the title itself says, prevents the right click of the mouse on the picture and therefore to any option related to it.

3. Name and face

Wherever possible, enter the name of the brand, website, the creator of the content or your own face, all seasoned with debt links. This will create an extra step of work for those who would like to limit themselves to a pure copy.

And in other cases it becomes really difficult. In fact, removing one of these elements from a video requires some knowledge in the field of editing.

4. Copyright

You can also bring the law into your team. Equipping yourself with copyright protection is the best way to both defend and attack:

• Defense: make it clear on every content that the work is copyrighted through logos, writings and messages;
• Attack: In the case of plagiarism, notify the user of the value of the copyright and, if appropriate, take legal action.

Victory is guaranteed on all fronts. The only questionable point is when and where one’s work is stolen and then put back into the Internet’s nervous system. Let’s discover some protections.

5. Monitoring tools

There are several tools to monitor the online activity and understand the course of the events of the material.

TinEye allows you to enter the URL of your own image or directly upload it and analyze if it is present in other points of the web.

Copyscape instead detects parts of websites or text that have been copied and reported elsewhere. It will show both similar and identical content, if there should be.

These are just a few examples of the many ways and means of preventing and monitoring network activities to make it clear that the issue of material theft is serious and the tools to combat it exist.

Online Piracy

Do you sell a program, website or software created by your company and have you discovered that it is present on free content sharing sites and can be downloaded through programs like Torrent?

The issue becomes much more serious, as you have fallen victim of piracy.

You are no longer faced with a republication of an article or video, though always serious, but with a real theft of a product for sale.

And especially for small-medium companies, such a situation could cost a lot of money. Because if IBM has to suffer a theft of its own software, it would be a limited damage to the company as a whole.

But if the victim is much smaller and maybe the entire turnover hangs on that one product, it’s red alert. There could be a drastic drop in sales/subscriptions, with a consequent loss of popularity and influx of money.

Even the reputation would suffer a serious blow, being marked as “no longer useful”, because so much the same service is free within a few clicks. And as I said at the beginning, up to the scenario of bankruptcy, although rare fortunately.

From the simple image of an article to piracy, having an ally on your side makes you sleep more serene nights. Monitoring, tools and various barriers create a certain security, but nothing too complex to break after a basic computer course.

ReputationUP can offer what you can only get from a team of experts in a field like our: the guarantee. Once he becomes our customer, every content will be treated as gold, with total monitoring of every possible copy or violation of its value.