Before discussing the topic in the title, we want to say that this is the hundredth post on our blog! Hooray! We took a decision last year to blog nearly 5 times a week about the technical issues that we face during our work on your websites, so that other people can learn from our knowledge! Posts on our blog vary in complexity from very easy to very difficult – but we have striven to make every post easy to read, to understand, and to apply. Also, whenever possible, we have suggested different ways to accomplish the same thing – depending on your technical knowledge and/or depending on your environment.
Now let’s get back to the main topic – how can someone protect content on his Joomla website. The short answer is that there is no way for someone to protect his content on any website (whether it’s Joomla or not) – when the information is public, it just becomes public. For example, if someone reads one of your articles and likes it, he may just copy it and use it elsewhere. However, there are ways to deter non-technical people from stealing your content, such as:
- Disabling right-clicking: You can disable right clicking on your Joomla website by adding some JavaScript code either in your main template or in a Jumi module that is available on all the pages on your website. Note that technical people can just disable JavaScript to overcome this obstacle (and then they will be able to steal your content).
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Streaming your videos: Using streaming to display videos is the best way as it’s much lighter on your bandwidth and people won’t just download the video and then place it on another website. Again, this method can be overcome by installing a browser plugin that will allow the download of a streamed video.
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Blocking access to content thieves: If your website doesn’t receive a lot of traffic, then you’ll be able, after a thorough analysis of your weblogs, to know which IP is stealing content from your Joomla website. You can either block that IP or block the country that hosts this IP altogether. Again, if the person is persistent, then he might try to use a proxy to illegally gain access to your website.
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Adding a copyright notice: Something like © copyright www.yourjoomlawebsite.com will deter many content thieves, especially those residing in developed countries. Note that every website owner should add this line to every page of his/her website, otherwise, the content of these pages is not copyrighted and thus can be used by anyone in any manner (that’s according to the law). Usually, the copyright notice should be added to the footer of your website (which will make it available on every page). By adding this copyright notice, your content will be protected by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
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Checking for duplicates on the Internet: As a website owner, one of the tasks that you should do regularly is to search for content duplicates all over the web. For example, let’s say that you have this sentence in one of your articles: The lazy fox jumped over quick brown dog who was following a frog who was trying to eat a fly. To check for duplicates on the web, you copy this sentence, and you add enclosing quotes, so it will be “The lazy fox jumped over quick brown dog who was following a frog who was trying to eat a fly” and then you search for it on Google. If you see websites other than yours displaying this content (it is very unlikely that another website will have this exact same content by pure coincidence), then they most likely stole it for you. The first thing to do is to alert the website owner telling him to remove the article off his website. If he refuses to do so or if he doesn’t reply, then your next step is to alert Google.
If you need help implementing one or more of the above steps, or if you need further help in protecting your content on your Joomla website, then look no further: we, at itoctopus, will definitely help you. Just contact us and we’ll take it from there!