stapel - 5:04 pm on Mar 29, 2006 (gmt 0)

Mr Bo Jangles said: 'no right click' *will* stop 60% or more of those that would steal content....

I have to agree. While the "no right click" thing can be annoying, it will stop an astounding number of plagiarisers, some of whom will actually write to complain that "I need this to finish my paper, you effing itch-bay!" or something similar.

Sadly, many (most?) of the scrapers are scraping because they are morons who can't create anything on their own. As such, they also cannot figure out "View Source", "Print Screen", or their browser's cache. So a stupid little Javascript is more than sufficient to shut them down.

andrea99 said: Why do you have a hateful attitute toward someone who just wants to collect your pictures on their hard drive?

Where did he say he hated the scrapers and wanted to hurt them? I only see a request for information regarding copyright protection. Please clarify. Thank you.

andrea99 said: They are the one's who will promote your site and send people to it.

Wow. Talking about "assuming facts not in evidence"! <smile>

While many plagiarisers do indeed claim that they scraped and re-posted or otherwise re-used the content of others as a "compliment" or as "free advertising", I'm afraid that this is neither logical nor in accordance with current legal theory. If you want to "compliment" a site, say nice things about. If you want to "advertise" a site, post a link to it.

See? No scraping or plagiarism required!

andrea99 said: There may be the occasional nut that requires actual legal action....

How about an average of one a week?

buksida said: I have plastered a big copyright www.domain.com in huge letters....

Watermarking is good, though only effective for JPEG type images (photos, etc). For GIF type images (cartoons, logos, etc), you either need to make the label obvious (as you have done) or else hide it with transparency. (Details upon request.)

Something else that's useful: The scrapers, usually being morons, very frequently don't bother renaming the images they've taken. If you use a somewhat unique naming system (something like "frog_3q4.jpg" instead of just "frog.jpg"), then you may be able to find copies through Google Images and similar services. Of course, that leaves you with the hassle of having to hunt down all of your images, which is a major pain in the a$$. So try watermarking and such to try to prevent the scraping in the first place.

For text, you might want to try using the Copyscape service. Since starting with Copyscape, our incidence of plagiarism (that we've been able to detect, anyway) has gone from about one a week to about one a quarter. It's been wonderful!

My best wishes to you.

Eliz.