Kamis, 29 Desember 2011

Prevent Content Theft and Copyright Infringement

Prevent Content Theft and Copyright Infringement

How annoying it is, spending an awful amount of time researching and writing articles for your Blog, only to find out that some people have stolen your articles and reproduced them in their blogs as though they wrote them. Over the weekend, we decided to take action against one of the several “thieves” and we relate our experience here so that you have an idea how you should proceed when you meet someone who steals your website or Blog contents. Our Blog is exactly 5 months old and if such incident can happen to new bloggers like us, it can happen to you too.

Copyright

You see this legal term often. Basically, what it means is that if you are the author of a piece of work (writing, drama, music score, art, etc.), you own the “copyright” to that work. Under the laws of many countries, your works enjoy copyright protection. You can authorize or prohibit others from reproducing, distributing, publishing, displaying or performing your works.

In U.S. for instance, you need not register your work in order to secure your copyright. Copyright protection is automatic i.e., it starts the moment your work is created. Unlike the previous laws, there is also no longer a need for you to insert any copyright notice in your site reminding people of the copyright protection. You can put a notice, but you don't have to. Essentially, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Theft and Hijacking

These are how the internet thieves steal:-

a. Writing and Images

They block copy your original writing, paste it into their Blog post. They use your images, graphics and artwork as well. Nothing is mentioned about you. Readers will think they wrote these articles. They establish their pool of readers and earn revenue through their AdSense impressions or clicks. Even if there is a mention about you somewhere, all their contents are lifted from you. You put in the efforts but they enjoy the rewards.

These people even went so far as to ask us questions which their own readers asked them. Once we replied to these Anonymous queries, they in turn let their readers know, in the manner that the answers came from them.

b. RSS Feed

You can put other people's Feed headlines into your Blog. Go to Template -> Page Elements -> Add a Page Element and select “Feed”. Type in the RSS or Atom Feed URL of that site and you will have the headlines of their five recent posts displayed in your Blog. Some blogs have no original content, except for these Feed headlines from many different blogs.

Many of us don't mind having these headlines in other blogs. Readers who want to learn more about the article will click these links and be brought to our Blogs. However, these thieves go beyond that. Some of them reproduce the full post based on the Feeds. We saw commercial sites using Feed converters to save our contents and put the articles up for sale to interested parties.

We had therefore changed our Feed settings from Full to Short, so that feed readers will only get an excerpt of the articles. If they want to know more, they will have to visit our site to read the details. If you want to change yours too, go to Settings -> Site Feed and under “Allow Blog Feed”, choose “Short”.

c. Hijacking

Instead of just a couple of posts, these thieves can steal everything from the layout and design to the contents and links, thus the term “blog hijacking”. Your site is literally duplicated. When we obtained our first Google Page Rank, a PR5, we found this problem to be rather serious. People were trying to pass off their sites as if they were ours or related to ours.

Steps to take when contents are stolen

1. Stay calm

It is natural to be angry at the thief. Let not anger taint our decisions. We must act professionally. If you are tempted to spam the thief's blog with threats and insults, please don't. You may in the process get yourself into unnecessary legal trouble. Not forgetting, a person who has no qualms stealing your contents can probably do you lots of other harm if he/she wants to. In that same spirit, although we shall make references to the thief who stole our content, we shall not be naming him. We shall call the thief Mr X in this article.

2. Identify what has been stolen

Before making any claim, we should be certain as to what has been taken from us. In our incident, it was a clear-cut case of hijacking. Mr X used a Blog title that could mislead the public into thinking that it was related to us, the description of the Blog was exactly the same as ours, the posts and pictures were an exact duplicate, and the post titles, colors and labels were the same.

Excerpt of Mr X's Blog description:-
Content Theft and Copyright Infringement

Excerpt of Mr X's post titled “Add Video Clip to Blog”:-
Content Theft and Copyright Infringement

It is important to save these as evidence of infringement. Go to the offending Blog site, click a “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. If you have a printer, save the printed copies. Otherwise, if you have a Photo software, open a new image file, paste the image and save. Note down the date and time these images were taken. We took only a few samples because there were simply too many; all the 23 articles on Mr X's site were ours.

3. Find the thief

Most of them do not have email addresses or contact particulars in their blogs or profile pages. Even if they do, they are likely to be fake. Nonetheless, there are several ways to ascertain the identity. In this case, Mr X had several other blogs under his profile page. One of them was titled Mahathir bin Mohamad, the contents were an exact replica of the page at Wikipedia relating to the former Prime Minister of Malaysia. There was another blog titled “Kelantan history”. We went to our visitor stats, tracked by Statcounter and Google, zoomed in on the unusual visitor activities, and identified the IP address of one that was from Kota Bharu in the state of Kelantan, Malaysia. We could be wrong. The person could have routed his traffic through Malaysia. He could very well be a U.S. citizen interested in Malaysian politics. Be that as it may, we had a possible lead.

Next, we visited his source page. In Firefox, go to “View” and “Page Source” or press Ctrl+U. In Internet Explorer, go to “View” and “Source”. From the source code, look for “google_ad_client” to find out his Google AdSense publisher number. Most of these thieves steal your content so that they can earn advertising revenue from visitors to their sites. Invariably, they will have some form of advertisements. If it is not AdSense, just look for any other Ad codes. Take note of all these. Better still, save a copy of the source code as evidence.

Read all the blogs by this person. Often, the remarks made in the comments or chatbox may give you an indication as to who the person is.

Search the net for other links to this person's identity. The blog may be registered in some blog directories. Start with Technorati, and move on to social networking sites. All you want is to gather as much information as possible regarding this person or his internet activities. If the matter becomes contentious, a court action may have to be filed and notice served on the offending party.

4. Contact the thief

After you have done sufficient homework, write your first note to the person. If there is no email address, leave a message in one of the posts. Our first message to Mr X was polite and non-confrontational. This was what we wrote:-

While I am honored that you have found my guides useful, copying them wholesale and reproducing them as if they are yours is an outright breach of copyright. Please remove the articles immediately.


We waited for a day and checked back. There was no response and the blog was still what it was. That was when we adopted a stern tone, and our second message was this:-

I have written to you yesterday informing you that you have illegally copied and reproduced my articles from my blog. These are original content of which I, as the author of the articles, own the copyright. Your act in reproducing them without my permission is clearly illegal under the laws.

If you do not take immediate action to remove all the 23 offending articles, I shall proceed to inform all the relevant parties, including but not limited to Google, search engines, advertisers and the authorities. I reserve as well my rights to claim for any damages and costs as a result of your illegal action.


Mr X responded and said in our chatbox, “hello bro..sorry.i still new blogger.i delete all that article already...sorry again.” [No, he is not our brother. As I understand, it is their form of greeting.] His excuse was that he was new to blogging. Our response was simple - “I don't think copying or plagiarizing has to do with new or not new blogger. And from the way you copied, I think you know enough about coding, maybe more so than us.” There is no excuse for committing illegal acts and we are not going to feel bad just because they call themselves new bloggers.

With that, we let the matter rest. However, we want to let you know what we had prepared in the meantime while we awaited his response.

5. Contact directories

The first place we searched was one of our favorites - Technorati. We saw Mr X's blog and contacted the staff. We highlighted the infringement and requested for a temporary suspension of the offending blog while we proceeded to take the necessary actions. The staff was very prompt in their response and upon their review, they temporarily suspended the blog. Note that in this instance, every one of the 23 articles he had were ours. If it had been just one or two articles copied, the staff may not readily agree to a suspension of the listing. Since the articles have now been removed, we had written to the staff updating them on the matter.

Locate all the listings in the various directories and keep them handy. Often, if it were a genuine case, the administrators will take action or advise you on the cause of action. This is a damage control step. We want to minimize the exposure of these stolen content to other net users.

6. Contact advertisers

We were prepared to contact the Google AdSense staff since we had on hand the publisher number of Mr X. Under the AdSense policies, there is a term that reads:-

“Copyrighted Material

Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”

You can report the incident to them, although in order for them to act, they are likely to request that you file the official notice of infringement.

The details can be found at the Google page on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We prepared a draft of the notice which we would have used if Mr X did not respond. You have permission to adapt from this draft if you have to serve a similar notice to Google AdSense in future:-

[Date]

Google, Inc.
Attn: Google Legal Support, AdSense DMCA Complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

[or Via Fax: (650) 618-8507, Attn: Google AdSense Support, DMCA complaints]

Dear Sirs

Copyright Infringement Notification for AdSense

I am the author and copyright holder of the original articles at [blog address]. Among the copyright protected material are these articles at:-

[Titles and URLs of original articles]

I found out that another site at [thief's blog address] bearing the AdSense publisher ID [number] had used the abovementioned material without my permission, namely by reproducing them in their site as follows:-

[Titles and URLs of offending articles]

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials as described above is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Yours faithfully

[Name]
[Signature]

[Address and contact particulars]


If there are other advertisers, contact them too. No advertiser will want to be embroiled in a copyright infringement battle. Chances are that they will withdraw the advertisements, temporarily or otherwise. Without advertisement revenue, the theft of the content becomes worthless for the thief.

7. Ban from Search Engines

The offending blog can be removed from search engine listings too. You can find out what you have to do for search engines like Yahoo, Google, and MSN when you come across sites that have stolen your Blog contents.

Update: Thanks to all our readers for the support. Jonathan Bailey and The Beading Gem, who shared their comments below, had correctly pointed out 2 major areas which we have not included in this article. Here are the updates.

8. Contact Blog Host

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act Title II “creates a safe harbor for online service providers (OSPs, including ISPs) against copyright liability if they adhere to and qualify for certain prescribed safe harbor guidelines and promptly block access to allegedly infringing material (or remove such material from their systems) if they receive a notification claiming infringement from a copyright holder or the copyright holder's agent.” Although worded differently, a quick check on the Copyright Acts of Commonwealth and other jurisdictions suggest that the spirit of their laws are similar. Under the terms of service, most blog hosts and service providers, like Blogger.com, will act on notice of copyright infringement and take actions which may include “removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating subscribers.”

We have talked about contacting Google AdSense and Google search engine. Although Blogger.com is owned by Google, being a big company, there are certainly different sets of people handling complaints like this. If the person's blog is registered with Blogger.com, you may use the above draft letter but change the addressee to:-

Google, Inc.
Attn: Google Legal Support, Blogger DMCA Complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

[or Via Fax: (650) 618-2680, Attn: Blogger Legal Support, DMCA Complaints]


These are the links to the detailed copyright protection policies of some of the popular blog hosts:-

* Blogger.com

* Wordpress

* Xanga

* Multiply.com

* LiveJournal

* Typepad

* MySpace

* Yahoo 360°

* Soulcast


9. Creative Commons License

If you do not want a full copyright protection, you can use a Creative Commons License and give certain rights to people to use, distribute or build upon your work. Read the terms of the various types of Creative Commons Licenses that you can use and choose the one that best suits your purpose. Click on the logo and you will be brought to another page where they give you the HTML code to place the appropriate logo into your Blog. If you want the logo in your sidebar, login, go to Template -> Page Elements -> Add a Page Element at the sidebar, choose HTML/JavaScript and paste the code. With the logo, viewers will know what license applies to the material in your Blog.

Let us as Blog owners be united in protecting our legal rights. If we come across any infringing sites, keep each other informed. In that way, we can protect our works and justify the blood, sweat and tears that we have put into them.

Scrolling Text - Marquee HTML Code

Scrolling Text - Marquee HTML Code

This HTML term Marquee is used to create a scrolling or sliding text. The text can move across the screen horizontally or vertically at a certain speed determined by you. Note, however, that while it looks nice to have scrolling announcements, advertisements, quotations, or links, having too much animation in your Blog may distract and irritate your readers. We had earlier created a line of scrolling text in the Header of our Quotes Blog to let you have an idea what you can do for your Blog. Also, animated tags like this are not W3C-compliant. Microsoft came up with the marquee tag and while most browsers support it, W3 did not accept it. We shall be discussing this in later articles on CSS3 and JavaScript alternatives.

For this tutorial, we begin with a short explanation of what the attributes do before giving you examples of how these attributes can be applied.

Marquee Attributes

behavior="scroll"
behavior="alternate"
behavior="slide"


This defines how the text will move. The default is Scroll. If the behavior is not specified, the text scrolls by moving from one end to another. Where the behavior is Alternate, the text will move back and forth. The Slide seems to have the same effect as Scroll in Firefox browser. In Internet Explorer, the text under Slide may move to one end and stop.

direction="left"
direction="right"
direction="up"
direction="down"


The default is "left", meaning that if no direction is specified, the text will move from right to left.

loop="3"


This sets the number of times the marquee will scroll. For example, in Internet Explorer, if the number is 3, the text will scroll 3 times and stop. This command might be ignored by Firefox and the text continues to scroll. For both browsers, if no value is specified or if this attribute is omitted, the marquee will scroll or loop continuously.

scrollamount="1"


This is the amount of scrolling (in pixels). If the number is 1, the text moves by 1 pixel each time and therefore scrolls at a slow pace. If this attribute is not stated, the default value is 6. The higher the number, the faster the text scrolls.

scrolldelay="100"


This is used to set the interval between each scroll movement in milliseconds. The default value is 85. Here, the higher the value, the slower the text scrolls. A value that is smaller than 60 would be ignored and replaced by the value 60. In Internet Explorer, if you really want the text to zoom at lightning speed, you can set a small delay like 20 and specify the truespeed attribute as true (see below).

truespeed="true"
truespeed="false"


This tells the browser whether or not to stick to the scrolldelay values lower than 60 that you have set. The default value is false and the browser will ignore values less than 60. Set it as true if you want the browser to adhere to the low scrolldelay value and have the text scroll very fast.

bgcolor: rgb(255,0,0)">#XXXXXX"


Should you want a background color for the scrolling text, you can specify the color code into #XXXXXX. You may refer to the HTML Color Code Chart for the color codes.

height="50px"
height="80%"


You can specify the height of the marquee box in pixels or percentage value. The default value is the height of the contained text.

width="200px"
width="80%"


Similarly, you can set the width of the marquee box in pixels or percentage value. The default width is the width of the frame that the marquee appears in.

vspace="20px"
vspace="80%"


In Internet Explorer, you can set the top and bottom margins outside the scrolling text by stating a vspace (vertical space) margin in pixels or percentage value.

hspace="20px"
hspace="80%"


You can also set the left and right margins outside the scrolling text by stating a hspace (horizontal space) margin either in pixels or percentage value.

Where to place the marquee code

You can place the scrolling text either in your Header, Footer, Sidebar, or blog post.

To have it above or below the Header or Blog Posts, see that you are able to Add Page Element in the Header and Post Body.

Go to Template -> Page Elements -> Add a Page Element, select HTML/JavaScript to add the marquee code.

If you want the text to be in your Posts, just like what you see in this post, see that you are in the “Edit HTML” mode and not “Compose” mode when you add the marquee code.

Marquee HTML Code

The basic code to add is this:-

Example 1

Text scrolls from right to left by default.


Text scrolls from right to left by default.

Notice that by default, the text scrolls from right to left, and it loops continuously. You can of course change the background color by specifying the Hexadecimal color code under bgcolor.

Further Examples of the Marquee code, applying the attributes discussed above:-

Example 2

Bouncing text using the alternate behavior.


Bouncing text using the alternate behavior.

Here, the text bounces from one side to the other and the width of the text box has been reduced to 80%.

Example 3

Text scrolls upwards.

For the text to appear in the next line, add this tag

after the previous line.



Text scrolls upwards.

For the text to appear in the next line, add this tag

after the previous line.

The scrolldelay has been set at 150. Increase this value if you want a slower speed.

Example 4

Text scrolls downwards.

For the text to appear in the next line, add this tag

after the previous line.



Text scrolls downwards.

For the text to appear in the next line, add this tag

after the previous line.

In this example, we use scrollamount to control the speed. The higher the value, the faster the speed. In Internet Explorer, you will see the left and right margins set under hspace.

Change Font style and Color of text

Notice in the above examples that the text is black. If you want a different color or style for your text, you can set the style of the text before the marquee code. Here are some examples:-

Example 5

Text scrolls from left to right.


Text scrolls from left to right.

What we have done here is to specify a color for the text. You can look up the Color Code Chart for more colors.

Example 6

Text scrolls from left to right.


Text scrolls from left to right.

You can set the font-family for the text. It can be a generic font like cursive, serif, monospace, fantasy and so on. It can also be a specific font family like times, arial, courier, verdana, etc. You can state the font-size as xx-small, x-small, small, smaller, xx-large, x-large, large, larger, or a percentage value.

Update:

Pause/Stop and Start a Scroll

Readers have asked whether the scrolling text can be paused when a visitor moves his mouse cursor over the text. This is useful when he wants to read the text or click a link with the text. To start and start a marquee, the additional arguments used are the "onmouseover" and "onmouseout" events to add a simple JavaScript. It will pause the scrolling text when the mouse is over it and resume the scroll when the mouse leaves the text.

Example 7

Text scroll pauses when the mouse hovers over it and starts again when the mouse is moved out of the text.


Text scroll pauses when the mouse hovers over it and starts again when the mouse is moved out of the text.

Scrolling Link List

If you are interested in having a Scrolling Link List, we have explained how you can do it in our article on Numbered List and Bulleted List.

Submit Blog to Search Engines

Submit Blog to Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other factors are considered by search engines, such as relevance, unique content, coding and quality of links. The major search engines know that revealing these factors will only encourage manipulation of the ranking system and have thus been secretive about how the ranking algorithms work.

While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.

Website Indexing

Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.

Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-

1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.

2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.

3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.

4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.

6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.

7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.

List of Search Engines

You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.

* Google
* Yahoo! Search
* Microsoft Live Search
* Alexa Web Search
* Baidu (Chinese search engine)
* ExactSeek
* SearchSight
* Scrub the Web
* EntireWeb
* Gigablast
* Exalead
* SearchKing
* whatUseek
* AnooX
* Splat Search
* Walhello
* SearchIt
* email Mozdex
* Jayde
* Infotiger
* Abacho (European search engine)
* Submit-one
* TowerSearch
* HotLaunch
* Shoula
* The-search-site
* Websquash
* Unasked
* eVisum (educational resource)
* DinoSearch
* SearchRamp
* SearchtheWeb
* SearchWarp
* Mixcat
* BestYellow
* Beamed


Website Submission Services

There are many sites on the internet offering free website submission services to search engines. The list of search engines are by and large the same. For a fee, some of them offer to send your URL to more than a hundred search engines. Is it necessary to have your webpage listed in all the smaller search engines? We think that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have cornered such a large share of the market that it is sufficient just to have your website listed there. However, the decision is yours to make. For a start, you may want to use their free services and monitor the traffic.

* FastSubmit
* Submit Express
* AddMe
* Freesubmissionweb
* ineedhits
* Submitshop
* Searchengineoptimising
* AddPro
* Pageranklist
* Freewebsubmission
* Amfibi
* Burf
* Jerkasmarknad
* LocalSubmit
* SrSubmit


We shall update this list every now and then and you may want to bookmark this page. Click the Bookmark button below and revisit this page.