Content theft is a biggest nightmare for any content owner, especially for we bloggers, I had many bitter experiences with copycats. One among which I’ve written as an article. Beware Of Copycats. They Will Steal Your Traffic & Your credits!. Then I decided to put an end to this mess, and in my research, DMCA copyrights act got into my attention. Much of a surprise that many of we bloggers doesn’t know about DMCA take down services. If you are a victim of content theft, then you must read:
DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and its sole purpose is to prevent copyright infringement and other illegal activities, not only for web.
According to wikipedia:
DMCA is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works.
Although different countries have their own copyright law, DMCA has been followed all along the web since majority of the sites are hosted in the servers hosted in the U.S. And internet companies like Google has separate department to handle copyright issues and takedowns. Google users can report copyright infridgement by visting http://www.google.com/dmca.html to prevent such things from appearing in Google search an other google products. So if you are a blogger and found any person illegally using your work and getting credited with Google services to, then you can immediatley report Google.
How bloggers can effectively use DMCA?
DMCA.com is a service by DMCA authorities to help bloggers and website owners/webmasters to protect their original images, design, writing, videos, articles or any work from online theft and spollers or spam bloggers. This service by DMCA.com is at free or charge. However, if content theft is regular and serious in your case, then they also provides DMCA Toolkit which you can use for takedown cases on regular basis, at a reasonable charge of $10/month.
For bloggers, DMCA badges will give enough protection to prevent online content theft and you’ll be able to track them as it happens. If your page has DMCA badges, then anyone will hesitate to think about copying your work. With the DMCA badge not only that you will be able to see who copied your work but aso submit a takedown case to get the stolen content removed from his/her site. But for free account there is a limitation of 1 takedown per year, if at all your content is stolen. For paid account, (i.e $10/m) there is no takedown limitation, they can have any number of takedown. So you can choose whether to use free badges or DMCA toolkits.
So you can signup for free DMCA account from here and add the DMCa badge in your pages, it will automatically detect the website you’ve added the badge and keeps a record of it, in your DMCA account, so that you can monitor content theft and react quickly if any content theft happens. Below is a screenshot of DMCA control panel where my protected pages are automatically listed. That means you only need signup and add the badge to your website, DMCA will take care of th rest.
What type of my work can be protected?
Protected content type include website text, graphics, photographs, videos, applications, articles and so on. There is no category limitation, any original content that you created can be protected, whether you’ve copyrighted it or not.
How to add the DMCA badge in your web page?
Once you’ve signed up with DMCA.com, you can get your badges from this page. If you are a blogger using Blogspot or Blogger.com then you can follow the steps for bloggers. Else if you are using self hosted WordPress, then you can follow the below steps:
Adding DMCA badges in all post page of your WordPress blog at a time.
Step: 1
After logging in to your DMCA.com account, you can now copy the badge code from this page. Now open the Cpanel of your hosting account and locate the Single.php file in the theme folder. (Basically: /public_html/wp-content/themes/themename/single.php).
Step: 2
Once you have the code copied in your clipboard, you can insert it into the theme in two ways. One is by adding the raw code in Single.php after some code similar to the below code depending to your theme. If you feel confused, please drop your comments, I’ll take care of the rest 🙂
<php the_post()?>
The second way is by injecting a code in Functions.php. Refer this article for more instructions.
Adding DMCA badges in all post page of your Blogger/Blogspot blog at a time.
Step: 1
Log in to your blogger account, and then from dashboard, >> click on “Layout” link. >> Now click “Edit HTML” >> Check “Expand Widget Templates, >> Now search for post.body using your browsers built-in search feature CTRL+F.
Step: 2
By default it should appear in your layout code only for once and you should reach the line something like this:
<p><data:post.body></data:post.body></p>. Now, past your DMCA badge code just after this line of code. And thats it, the badge should appear below all post in your blog.
If you liked, this post, please help promote it by sharing it with your friends using twitter, facebook, digg etc. We will also be writing another post on this topic about DMCA toolkits in detail, subscribe to our email to get updates in your inbox!
