Plagiarism Protection

Plagiarism is when someone copies over chunks of your site, or, more often, just duplicates your site in its entirety. Original and high quality content is website gold. And a lot of unscrupulous, lazy people want your gold. A theft of your resource is not the only problem – if your content is duplicated, search engines will see your website as “a copy” and you will drop in ranking, making it hard for new customers to find you online.

In short, here is how to protect against plagiarism

To protect against plagiarism, you can register with the relevant bodies, place the registration logos on your site and include a copyright notice. Furthermore, you can make text and pictures on your site impossible to highlight, copy or save by using right-click. This will deter most of the attacks. Partly because not all attackers are smart, and partly because they know the law is on your side.

Your website, provided that the content is original, is a piece of intellectual property. It is protected by your country’s copyright laws and the laws of other countries who have signed the same treaty. Here are two myths:

Myth 1: you need to have registered your copyright for it to be valid.
You don’t. You hold the copyright automatically once you create an original piece of intellectual property (i.e. your website). However, in most cases you will need to have registered your copyright in order to take court action against the person who stole your website.

Myth 2: you need to have registered your copyright in order to display the copyright notice / relevant logos.
You can display these on your website whether you have registered your copyright or not.

So what can we do for you? We can:

• Register you with the copyright office(s) and file the paperwork on your behalf.
• Display the relevant protection badges on your website.
• Disable right-click on your website so your content can’t be copied with ‘Save As’
• Produce a copyright notice and place it on your website.
• Conduct regular checks and alert you if your content has been stolen.

Has someone plagiarised your website already? See what we can do to fix this problem under Dealing With Plagiarism.