Most of the webmasters put in a great deal of energy and time in developing quality content for their web site. But they are not aware of thousands of other webmasters who are using content from their web sites without permission.

The problem of online copyright infringement is a growing phenomenon. The ease and extent of infringement is greatly facilitated by the nature of web.

Webmasters can use the major search engines to check whether someone has stolen content from their site. For each search, they should carefully review the first two results pages. Here, we discuss some of the measures to safeguard your web content:

1. Place a Copyright Remark

You must demonstrate your copyright notice on each page of your web site. This notice should have the year of publication and also the name of your firm. This information could also be displayed in a graphic pasted in the footer of the page, eg.

© 2000-2004, Active Venture Pte Ltd. All rights reserved.

2. Register with the U.S. Copyright Office

You may also register your web site with the U.S. Copyright Office. Even if you don’t register, still you will get protection, but in that case you will have to collect evidence against the content thief.

You have to register your site with the U.S. Copyright Office within three months of its launch.

3. Action to be taken against online thieves

You should send them a strong mail telling them to stop their copyright infringement activities.

If they continue to violate copyright, send a mail to their ISP, credit card company, webhosting company, and the domain name registrar.

If nothing happens even after you have taken these steps, contact your lawyer for further advice to take legal action against the culprits.

Apart from the above mentioned measures, there are some simple tricks to prevent online thieves from lifting content from your web site:

1. Disable right click

You can use JavaScript to disable the right click of your mouse. But this method can be annoying for the sincere visitors to your site.

2. Software security

There are several softwares to prevent users from seeing your source code. These softwares invoke a JavaScript function "unescape" which "encodes" the HTML coding into a long series of characters. However, it can still be easily decoded to HTML using another function of JavaScript.

3. Use PDF files.

More usage of password-protected PDF files would prevent people from blatant copy and paste of your web content. Although the more experienced thieves could make use of several password recovery softwares available to break through the protected PDFs and copy the content.

4. Conversion of text to images

This solution takes a lot of time and the size of pages also get increased but is a fool-proof solution for copy-paste problem. But if someone is determined on lifting content from your site, then no one can stop him from re-typing the content.

5. Using Java/Flash

If your images are embedded in Java Applets or Flash, it is very difficult for online thieves to copy them.

Here again, the more experienced thieves will take a ‘print screen’ of your image, open it in paint and get way with it.

So, you could see that all these tricks would only prevent the new thieves from copying content. The more experienced ones could always come up with counter-measures for all these tricks.

To conclude, I would say that you should adopt one or more these tricks/measures to reduce copyright violation and for the more experienced thieves, you have to seek help of U.S. Copyright Office in taking legal action against them.