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Copyright messages and Scrapers

One easy way to ensure that your content remains your content is to add some kind of copyright statement on the copy, so that if someone borrows it for their own use, you could take legal action.

I have taken this is a step further by embedding in many of my posts the following HTML code:

This article is owned and written by Author: Me, all rights reserved. No part of any of the content of this article may be reproduced, distributed, modified, framed, cached, adapted or linked to, or made available in any form by any photographic, electronic, digital, mechanical, photostat, microfilm, xerography, mimeography, or other means, or incorporated into or used in any information storage and retrieval system, electronic or mechanical, without the prior written permission of Me.

The added fun with that is that I put it in an HTML comment at the start of the document. You can do this by simply inserting:

< ! --- This is my copyright notice, no copying without my permission you salacious plagiarist --->
Copyright
Copyright !

Into the HTML source for the document, the important parts are the codes at the start and end, so that the comment does not show up in your article. I have put a space between the < and the ! and the –, remove those to make it an actual comment.

Many scraping sites really don’t look too closely at the HTML coding of a page, and will typically steal this along with your content. The other fun thing is to include your own ads embedded in your article, that way your ads will appear in their re-authoring of your post.

Will this stop the scrapers? Not very likely, my only question is this really something I could use to prove ownership and such, but we shall see I suppose. One of these days I will need to sit down with a lawyer and discuss this stuff with him/her.

1 thought on “Copyright messages and Scrapers”

  1. Pingback: Internet And Its Slimy Underbelly

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