Worried about building a great site and having your content stolen? Your solution:

Conversation
1

There has been a lot of talk about stealing content: finding your content, photos and even testimonials on other people’s pages.

If you did a search on google for an image of a house to put on your site. Even you are guilty of stealing content. It’s like that whole Napster thing from 2003, but easier! …and less viruses.

I know some may laugh at me starting this thread, cuz I was a perpetrator myself. I stole content from someone else’s site and used it on other websites of mine. At the time, I thought it was a shortcut, something “everyone” did. I mean, come on, even the guy who’s site I took it from had a whole page (in August 2010…before I knew about screenshots) about Water-fed Poles and Pure Water cleaning that was lifted off a site from some guy in Britain! The page was full of British vernacular and spellings like "neighbour"or “favourite” and all the units were in litres.

I digress…

I apologized. Took down the content. Took the well-deserved abuse. And began to be above stealing content. (FYI, I’m still personally nervous about going to NOLA this year :()

Revamping my site and wanting to upload more pictures, I wanted to find a way to keep people from copying them or stealing my blog posts!

(Before you try to make any more sense of what you’re about to read. Set your site up using wordpress. If you haven’t yet, then … I’m blanking. Just do it.)

The solution? [COLOR=#333333][FONT=sans-serif] Installing the wordpress plug-in: [/FONT][/COLOR][B]WP Content Copy Protection

[/B]After I installed it, I had to make a modification so it wouldn’t allow content copying on macs. Like most plug-ins made in Croatia on a PC, I had to account for the “Command” key on a mac’s keyboard.
<e.ctrlkey &&…="" in="" it.

If you’re a code-wizard, like myself :cool: just copy the “ctrlKey” script of the .php file and paste it replacing it with “metaKey”. If you have no idea what I just said, just upload the contents of this attached file to: wp-content-copy-protection/fwpconsec.php fwpconsec.txt (3.83 KB)

[B]
Here’s what the plug-in describes:

[/B]== Description ==

WP Content Copy Protection is a simple plugin that uses multiple techniques in copy-protecting your blog content. Some of the most common copy methods, such as right click, image dragging, and keyboard copy shortcuts such as CTRL A, C, X, U, and P are disabled with this plugin.

This plugin is also equipped with mobile text/image protection as well as a Javascript error message which is served to clients with their Javascript disabled. The JS error is served in addition to blank site pages which is only ‘removed’ once the client enables his/her JS.

NOTICE

While this will most certainly help copy-protect your content, do remember that there are many other means one could use to get their hands on your content without using the context menu.

== Features ==

  1. Disable right click function on mouse
  2. Disable image drag and drop function
  3. Disable combo keyboard command (CTRL A, C, X, U, P) functions (No ‘Select all’, ‘Copy’, ‘Cut’, ‘Paste’, ‘View Source’, or Print via Keyboard)
  4. Disable ‘Hold to Copy’ function on most mobile devices. (Protects images and text from copy in most mobile devices)
  5. Displays a client-side error message when Javascript is disabled AND serves the client with blank pages until he/she enables Javascript
  6. iFrame Protection (Buster)

== This Plugin will NOT ==

  1. Have any negative effect on your SEO
  2. Have any negative effect on your Advertising (such as Adsense) : Ad codes are NOT affected by this plugin in any way

== Installation ==

  1. Download the .zip file
  2. Upload and extract the contents of WP Content-Copy-Protection.zip to your wp-content/plugins/folder
  3. Activate the Full-WP-Content-Security plugin in your WP-admin / Plugins
  4. Enjoy our content protection

The best part in all that: It’s SEO friendly and your competition can’t view your source code!

Let me know if you have any questions?</e.ctrlkey>

2

very cool for that angle Garrett, thanks for posting in such detail!

in addition, IMHO, I think protecting intellectual content (“property” in some cases) is more valuable than protecting a sentence or a picture, that’s where the “lemmings” will really copy stuff that could short circuit ones behind the scenes endless effort.

like what? a Seth Godin Purple Cow business model etc.

look at Kevin’s small med lg flat rate, I literally saw that sweep across the nation over a year and a half.

but how do you gain customers AND protect what you’ve worked hard for.

But I suppose every other industry feels the same way
stuff like that

3

Don’t be nervous, Garrett. You owned it and did the right thing by apologizing. I think you will and welcomed back and that you have a lot to contribute to the industry.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

4

Your competition will never be you. They may take a few ideas, but the execution and follow through will never match the originality of the creator…unless you stop.

Secrets of the 10 Most-Trusted Brands | Entrepreneur.com

…other ideas:

  • Get better at what you do.
  • Try “co-opetition” - where competition meets cooperation. (I’ve been speaking just about every day with a local window cleaner about how we can grow our business and bounce ideas off each other for improving our sites, customer approach, and other ideas.)
5

great article, thanks again Garrett

6

Also, @Bruce,

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

Sun Tzu, [I]Art of War

[/I]

7

Great Post. See you at Nola again.

8

Who am I gonna spy on now?

9

Only thing I don’t like about that plugin is that it requires JS to be enabled. Some people like to disable that- they don’t need it for the sites they view, and it can make browsing the web a lot less annoying… of course that’s probably a very small minority of computer users :stuck_out_tongue:

10

When I was first setting up my site I simply called or shot an email to other window cleaners asking if I could use this or that from their site. Every one of them was totally cool with it; seemed flattered.However I did not, and will not copy something from a local competitors site. Related to Kevin Dubrosky’s flat rate pricing I know that he gave permission to squeegeenomics attendees to copy it and I believe he also gave the same permission on public forums. I must admit though to lifting a few images off of Google image search. :frowning: