How do I prevent my blog posts from being copied?

I’m not defending them, but now you’ll understand how the record companies
feel. What you’re experiencing is a copyright violation and theft, pure and
simple.

And for what it’s worth, I feel your pain.

The short answer is that you can’t stop it. Not entirely. However we can
reduce it somewhat, and depending on the method being used to steal the
content, we can even put it to use – sort of.

Theft occurs primary two ways: RSS feeds, and content scraping.

Content scraping is pretty much what it sounds like: software (or humans) do
the equivalent of a copy/paste of your content into their blog. There’s
actually little that can be done technically to prevent it.

You can detect it, though, using services like CopyScape, Google
Alerts, or even a periodic search of phrases you know appear on your own
posts. Once you do find instances of your copied material, you can do things
like posting a comment indicating that it’s been stolen and where from, or even
submitting an official DMCA take-down notice to the hosting site or ISP. If the
site runs AdSense, reporting the site to Google is also often an appropriate
step.

But that’s really about all you can do. If your text is available on the
internet, it’s been copied.

(One side note: you can instruct “good players” not to archive your content
using instructions placed in a “robots.txt” file. Unfortunately those already breaking the law by
copying your content aren’t likely to follow the rules here either.)

What a lot of people forget about are RSS feeds. RSS feeds make
all or a portion of each entry you post available for people to subscribe to
using an RSS reader. Chances are your blogging software is already producing an
RSS feed, even if you didn’t tell it to.

The nice thing about RSS feeds is that they’re very easy for software tools
to read, parse, and act on. That means they’re an easy, structured way to have
your content appear in other places you want, like people’s RSS readers. The
problem with RSS feeds it that they’re an easy way to have your content appear
in places you don’t want, like the blogs and web sites of content
thieves.

Naturally one solution is to turn off the RSS feed in your blogging
software. I don’t recommend this.

There is an ongoing debate in the blogging and tech community as to whether
RSS feeds should contain the full content of each post you make on your blog,
or only a part requiring that the reader click-through to your web site to read
the rest. In my opinion the answer is obvious: if you want to retain some
semblance of control over what you publish on the internet you simply cannot
publish the full content in an RSS feed.

And that is my solution of choice: I’ve altered the RSS feed template in my
blogging software to only include the first few paragraphs of each article,
with a link back to the full article on my site. As a result the only place you
should be able to read this paragraph is on my site.

I’ve gone so far as to actually tailor the template a little with the
expectation that it will be republished. I’ve also adjusted my Terms and Conditions to explicitly allow the RSS
feed to be republished as long as all the links back to my site are
preserved.

Modifying your RSS feed may be easy or hard, depending on the blogging
software or content management system you’re using. If you care about content
theft at all, I recommend you review your options.