How to stop content from being stolen?…

To deactivate your syndicated (RSS) feeds, you must first remove any syndication (or RSS) links from your blog’s theme (they are usually in the sidebar or footer). Then, from your theme’s Header Template, remove this section (or the section which closely resembles it):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

Now, delete these files from your WordPress installation:

wp-atom.php
wp-feed.php
wp-rdf.php
wp-rss.php
wp-rss2.php

And, that should be it. No more feeds, no more splogs. At least you have an email notification system set up.

“There are various techniques that you can try to make your content harder to copy. For example, there are javascript snippets that disable the right-click menu on a user’s mouse [1], and similarly you can use javascript to hide the browser’s menu bar, etc.”

BTW, this does *NOT* work at all in practice. As well as annoying any readers, it’s (extremely) trivial to bypass and fails to stop the main sources i.e. automated programs which grab your content via RSS and republish it without any manual intervention.

ifelse: I agree wholeheartedly. It wouldn’t discourage any but the most novice of users, and presumably they’re not the problem, while it would annoy others a great deal.

Much warmth,

planetthoughtful

As a journalist/writer, I’ve had my work copied, most recently by a splog using RSS2Blog. I also see my pieces copied into forums etc. There’s a copy ‘n paste mentality out there that thinks if it’s on the internet, it can be freely copied. And splogs don’t care what they do with other people’s content, provided it earns them money. Zenpop – try splogreporter.com.

?? I wish I had something worth copying.

macmanx, thanks for that followup instructions, very helpful. If that’s not in the Codex, it should be. Even though WordPress espouses RSS and comes with it auto-enabled, really WP is useful to some sites that don’t want RSS.

I beleive there is also a plugin that will add a copyright to your feed… it might not be a big step, but whoever is getting feeds will see youre copyright shown up on someone elses site..

mmm, interesting topic of conversation. One suggestion for “making it harder” would be to provide your most valued text content inside an image. I realize its a little extra work, and might possibly provide a page layout challenge but its certainly going to deter copy/pastes more than some “no right click” javascript.

Unfortunately, the only sure fire way to avoid content theft is to not have content. Of course that isn’t a viable option I know. GadgetGuru is correct in that it is the way of the internet. Doesn’t make it right or ok but that is true. People think anything on the internet is free for the taking.

I hope you find the solution you are looking for. I will agree with others, disabling right clicking is one of the worst ways to go. From a visitor standpoint, it is irritating and I personally will not stick around a site that disables menus on my own system. I use my RC menu a lot and don’t enjoy being told I can’t. ??

To summarize:

As MacManx has kindly pointed out there is a plugin to automatically add your copyright message to your RSS / Atom feed items. If you publish your full content via feeds (default) then it add the copyright message to each feed items. So you will have fun watching them displaying your copyright message on their sites. Not only that it will also indicate that it is stolen. Surely it would do world of good to the reputation of such sites.

You can also disable the feeds altogether as MacManx instructed but that is in some way throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Several people do read blogs using feeds, myself included.

Bad Behavior or any spam control plugins will not help in any way. Preventing Magpie RSS from accessing your site will not help either as it takes one line of code to change it to behave like Internet Explorer / Firefox.

BTW: Content-in-images, stopping hotlinking does not solve this issue. Preventing hotlinking merely saves you some bandwidth.

splogreporter.com is a recent effort by a Kerala based blog pinging site – pingoat which tries to catch the splogs. It does allow you to take some action, check the site for details.

BTW: You mentioned you make significant income using blogs, care to provide some rough picture ??

Ban the IP of the website stealing you content and maybe disable rss feeds or somting

I think best solutions to prevent stealing is to make rss feed that contains only title and links to content, that way they can not still content and if they steal that rss fed they will give you links.