Protecting Your Website From Online Thieves - Part 3

Act now for your copyright

In the previous design article Prevention Cures Copyright, we covered how to protect your web site files and gather evidence of your copyright ownership. Now we will look at how you can take all of your preparation and use it to find your online thieves.

Use the major search engines

To tell if someone has stolen your web site or your web graphic images, you can use the major search engines.

Start by searching for words or phrases unique to your site, such as your company name. This is where we catch many online thieves. They steal our web content without remembering to take out every instance of our name.

For further quality searches, we recommend typing the article titles and headlines from your most popular web pages into the search box.

For each search, go through the first three results pages. If the content looks familiar, check the web address (URL). If it shows a link to a page you are not familiar with, click on it and review the page.

Make sure you are given full credit for your work that another site displays - especially if another web author has used your work without your permission. If there is no reference on the page to the original author or to your web site, you might have a case for copyright infringement.

Some search engines allow you to do searches for graphic images. You can also search for unique graphic images that you use on your site, particularly if you named your graphic image an unusual name. It can even be a 1 pixel x 1 pixel transparent GIF with an unusual name in an unusual place. Most online thieves are usually not savvy enough to find that image within your HTML documents.

Review your log files

Your log files can be helpful in finding online thieves. These statistical reports are carried by most web hosts and include updated records of who links directly to your web site.

Generally, your web host will provide you with password-protected access to these stats, which you can view online and print out. We recommend that at the end of every month, you print out your stats for that month and look through the list of web sites linking to yours. See which sites look unfamiliar and review those pages individually.

Before contacting anyone - alleged thief, web host, ISP, their partner sites, anyone - gather all evidence of theft first.

Make hard and digital copies of the stolen web page content and the source code. Print the web pages that were stolen and make sure the date is contained on every page you print. Include URL's and titles. You must have a date on the printed pages and the URL's in the event the host or the webmaster takes down the site.

Next, view the source code, that is, the HTML code, and print that. You can do this by going to the Menu command and View/Source in your web browser. Compare the code of the offender's site with your own to see how closely they match. Many online thieves will take HTML code without making any changes