This is part two of a multi-part blog series about using the law to protect your blog content against scrapers and thieves. In part one of this series, I showed you how to prepare your blog to fight - legally.
Your blog feed is perhaps the most important part of your blog. Truly successful blogs have thousands of subscribers who read feeds through feed readers. Most readers rarely ever visit the source blog of the feed content. Your feed is also the blood source for the content sucking machine scrapers and thieves who you are now fighting.
The base install of your blog’s feed is as out of shape as the blog itself when it comes to protecting your content so let’s get to work.
Before we begin, a note to let you know I will not debate the merits of a full feed or partial feed in this series. I am only trying to show you how to protect your blog content legally without spending any money on attorney’s fees and without stepping foot in court. Full or partial feed? That’s a different matter entirely.
The raw feed produced by a Wordpress blog is completely unprotected. When you allow your content to leave your blog to be consumed by readers on the readers’ terms, you are taking the risk that the content will end up on a scraper site. No successful blog works without an RSS feed so you have to learn to use your feed to your advantage.
You need to copyright your feed. If you care about your content, protect it with the tools available. Copyright was discussed earlier in this series. The importance of copyrighting your content with an appropriate notice as you disseminate the content to the rest of the world through feed readers is even more important than showing the copyright notice on site.
Unfortunately, Wordpress falls short with any type of copyright protection anywhere. To place a copyright notice in your feed easily, you need a plugin. I recommend Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin, a highly configurable, easily installable plugin to help you deter thieves sucking content from your feed.
This simple plugin adds a copyright notice to your full or partial feed that warns readers they should be reading the feed in a feed aggregator or RSS reader and if they’re not, they are reading the site on a scraper site and the content has been stolen. The message also asks them to notify you by providing your email address.
This kind of thing works. People do respond when they see content stolen like this.
I hear you saying, "Yeah, but serious sites strip stuff like this from your feed." No they don’t. They don’t have time to worry about stripping things from feeds. You will be amazed the first time you see this message posted on a scraper site like TechAddress.com, which is one of the worst offending scraper sites around but so well camouflaged as a legitimate site you hardly notice.
Antileech is also a very powerful plugin that you MUST download to protect your content. Antileech helps track the content thieves and can provide false content to their readers. The plugin is also supposed to be able to attempt to strip adsense from the pages of the offending thief but I haven’t seen this in action yet.
This is a screenshot from TechAddress taken about an hour after this post was originally written. This paragraph has been added because I needed the scraper site to take my feed bait so I could have a screenshot of this very article being ripped. Look closely at the content of the post on the scraper site and you will see Antileech has feed TechAddress a bunch of junk about ripping BuzzDroid’s feed. Cool, don’t ya think?
There is a third, almost sinister but completely legally thing you should do to your feed to fight scrapers and thieves.
Create a small 1×1 pixel image and upload the image to your /wp-content/uploads/ folder of your Wordpress installation. Save it as ‘feedphonehome.jpg’.
Assuming you’ve installed Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin as I mentioned above, open the plugin file and on or about line 28 change the first bit of the line from
$copyright = 'Copyright
to
$copyright = '<img alt="feedphonehome" src="http://yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/feedphonehome.jpg" />Copyright
This easily adds the ‘feedphonehome.jpg’ to your feed. Why add an image to your feed? Because that’s how we have fun with the scraper sites and content thieves.
This image shows a blue and white placeholder ‘?’ where the image will actually appear in your feed and on scraper sites like TechAddress.com although you will not see the ‘?’ itself because your image will just be transparent and invisible to the human eye in the feed reader.
In the next post in this series, I will show you how to have real fun with the bad guys, legally, of course.
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