Make Money from Blogs » Copyright

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 31 – Observing copyright law

ashish — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:07:39 +0000

Observing copyright law mean not seem relevant to a post on what is good Search Engine Optimization. And you might be thinking that with the need to get fresh content, what is wrong on taking some content from other sources and modifying them slightly in order to get fresh content for your site. However, keep in mind that Copyright Infringement can have serious legal issues, and if you are challenged, this can have pretty bad results for your site, and also on your rankings with search engine. So here goes some layman advice on Copyright Law (remember that for specific advice and queries on such a critical topic, you will need to consult a lawyer or expert and not depend on posts like this one). Here goes:
- You are allowed to quote sections from other posts or sites if these are meant for positive or negative acclaim, since this is covered under free speech
- However, for the above point, there are limitations. If you copy the main point of the other site or article, or copy huge sections of the other article, then it is beyond the fair use right and you are technically doing what some US courts have ruled as copyright violation
- There are many sites that allow the use of their material freely and you can use them in any way; however, keep in mind that just because a site or any kind of media does not have an explicit copyright, they are free to copy. Sites that allow free copy should have an explicit point stating so.
- You can even use company logos or names in your posts, subject to the same condition as above; you need to use them for acclaim or review; but you cannot use them for any kind of commercial purpose without approval from the owners of the company logos or names
- Quoting additional material from other sites beyond review fair use needs approval from the owners of the copyright
- There can be many different kinds of copyright notices, so you need to check about the kind of copyright notices that are present on the site from where you are planning to get content to ensure that you are doing the right thing
- If people come after you alleging copyright infringement, then you can be in serious trouble; especially if they come after all your hosting service or going after search engines where your site is ranked
- Hence, be very careful about the type of content you are using from other sites, do not look at this content as a way of filling your content needs; only use content under fair use

Adding your own copyright to your blog: Use the “Blog Copyright” plugin

ashish — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:02:35 +0000

Keeping the copyright updated on your blog can be a fairly hectic activity. if you update your copyright manually, then you can easily miss the copyright year updation as the years roll by. Even otherwise, there would be a query that you might have as to why you cannot just have a plugin that automatically updates the copyright years, or allows you to set a range for the copyright years. Well, that is possible using the “Blog Copyright” plugin at the following location.

From the site:

Blog Copyright is a WordPress plugin that displays a dated copyright mark. When displayed on general, category, search and author queries it provides a range of dates (first-last post years); on single posts, Pages and archive queries the year for the content will be used. Name, copyright term and reservation of rights text can be fully customized through tag parameters, or completely overridden with a custom field.
Blog Copyright is not so much a new plugin for me as a collection of code I’ve been using for a while, just now wrapped up in plugin clothing. So those who might be concerned I’m not driving on towards the finish line for a certain other project, rest assured this was little more than a pit stop.

Detecting plagiarism on your WordPress blog – using the Tracer tool

ashish — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:09:36 +0000

The previous post talked about using this tool if you have a Blog hosted on Google’s Blogger, but what if you have a WordPress account ? Well, this tool works for blogs running on WordPress, and numerous others (Ning network, Typepad, WebsiteWorks.com). It is fairly easy to add this to your WordPress blog, since WordPress has a plugin structure that easily allows the addition of more functionality. You can refer the following site (link) for installation instructions. Basically, this functionality requires adding code to the template, and just before the tag.
So, go for it. The code is setup to add a small link back to your site when they copy your content so that when they add the content to their site, the link gets added. This link will eventually get caught and you can then detect that your content is being coped elsewhere, and then you can take further action to remove the stolen content.

Protect your Blogger post – Use Tracer to add your own link back to the copied content

ashish — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:56:18 +0000

It remains difficult to protect your content. You can take measures such as adding a Javascript that will prevent people from being able to right-click, or which will prevent people from being able to select content from your blog, but there are ways around that. Such controls do prevent some people from being able to take your content, but there will be people who are more technologically competent, and they will be able to beat your controls.
The method to be used is to detect when somebody is stealing your content, and then confront that person. The main point in this approach is to find out when somebody is stealing your content through the use of tools such as Google Alert, through some smart searching through using Google, and through some other plugins. However, if you have a blog on Google’s Blogger interface, it will get more difficult to use such measures. One such tool however that you can use is called Tracer, and can be downloaded from this link.
The way that this tool works is that you can set it up on your Blogger blog through a HTML/Javascript gadget, and then the tool will add a back link to your site when somebody selects content from your site and copies it. There will be always some people who will notice the back link, but for those where a tool is used to copy, or when somebody is not careful enough, the back link will let you easily detect when somebody has copied content from your site.

Protect your content: Report a spam blog to Google

ashish — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:05:58 +0000

The Google Search service provides a huge percentage of traffic to most sites, especially those of individuals. The position of a site in the Google search index is a big variable in the success or failure of a site, and the removal of a site from the Google index can reduce a site (especially spam blogs) to becoming almost useless. And this is one of the approaches you should take if a site is stealing your content. Again, as I have repeated earlier, it is almost impossible to really protect your content from being stolen, and what you should concentrate on is how to close down those sections of another site where your content is being used.
The Google site to report stolen content being hosted on another site is at this link. From the site:

Help us to make Blogger and Blog*Spot spam-free by reporting spam blogs below. Please submit each blog only once. While we don’t reply to individual reports, we will review every submission as soon as possible and take action as necessary.