Whether it’s your images, your writing, or any other type of content that you’ve posted online, I would imagine that you would want to protect it—I know I want to protect my content. It is, after all, yours.

Unfortunately, it’s easier than ever for random people to find your content, do a quick copy and paste (or download an image), upload it to their own sites, and claim it as theirs. It can be hard to track, and it can be exhausting to take down.

But here’s the good news: you can track content theft, and you can get stolen content taken down. You just have to know how to do it.

When it comes to protecting your work from content theft, here’s what you need to know…

What Constitutes as Copyright Violation?

Before we look at protecting your content from copyright violation and content theft, let’s answer one question: what falls under the copyright protection?

If you’ve posted it online and it is genuinely yours (i.e., you didn’t copy it from someone else’s blog, another site, or anywhere else online), then it’s officially yours. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), all original content published online is automatically and immediately protected under copyright, whether you’ve got that fancy copyright symbol anywhere on your site or not. Even most stock photos are protected.

What this means is that anyone who takes your content and reproduces it on their own site without permission is violating copyright law. If they take your image and post it on their own blog, that’s copyright violation. If someone copies my blog post (or even an enormous chunk of my blog post and doesn’t credit it to either me or the site they took it from), that’s copyright violation. And you can go after them and make them take it down.

-As a very, very important note to freelancers and third party vendors: Keep up with your contracts, and understand what content you do and do not own (which is only one of the important reasons you should always work with a contract). Not only will you know who is liable for the content if someone comes after you, you’ll also know who the content belongs to.
Just because you created it doesn’t make it yours if you sold it to someone else and agreed to hand over ownership—even if you weren’t a ghostwriter and it still has your name on it. In some cases, a company you sell content to will sell it to someone else and they can have every right to do so if they possess full ownership, unless otherwise specified. Before you start going after people for stolen content, you’ll want to check who it actually belongs to first.–

How to Know if Your Content is Stolen

Realistically, there’s unfortunately not much you can do to actually prevent your online content from being stolen. Adding watermarks to your images or mentioning that the content is copyrighted somewhere can help deter content theft, but not prevent it entirely. So when we can’t stop it, we have to know how to protect our content outside of that.

The first step in this process is coming up with a method best suited to your business that will help you track your content across the web, and this is surprisingly easy with written, textual content and even visual content (it is, unfortunately, much harder audio content). Here’s some of my favorite tools to track stolen content online:

• Copyscape. Copyscape is my go-to plagiarism checker. All you have to do is copy and paste your article, or passages of it, into their search, and they’ll check it against everything online. This service is incredibly effective. If someone is taking your content, you’ll know.
  One service they offer, Copysentry, automatically monitors the entire web for copies of your pages or content and alerts you immediately. It starts at only $4.95 a month, and for big sites, I really recommend it.
• Google Alerts. Google alerts can be good when you want to get continued alerts about what’s popping up and when. Because you have to give them exact phrases, this requires some time and won’t automatically protect whatever content pops up on your site. While some people use Google Alerts to monitor content, I tend to use copyscape in general—but with one exception. I have a Google Alert set up with my name.This sounds vain and vaguely resembling narcissism, but it’s highly effective and it has multiple benefits. The first is that I can track what content I’m putting out and when it’s published (the second of which I’m not always aware of, depending on what site I’m writing for). The second benefit is that a surprising number of content thieves are incredibly lazy, to the point where they copy and paste the entire article or post—including your name. (For the record: quoting a passage and giving credit is ok. Saying “this post was by this person, here it is” and reposting the entire post is NOT ok.)
• Google Reverse Image Search. If you’re worried about your visual content being stolen, this is the tool you should be using. When you upload an image for them to search, Google will scan all the websites they can track (which is Google, so it’s a lot) and will present you with the sources showing said image. Hopefully it will only be your site, but if it’s not, take a screenshot of the stolen content on the fraudulent site.
• Link to your own site in posts. First of all, inbound linking is a smart technique to begin with—you can send readers to other content that you’ve posted online, keeping them on your site longer.  It also can help you track content theft.
  I’ve already mentioned that a ton of content thieves are lazy and will copy the post exactly as it is. This is not an exaggeration. I’ve had multiple people take my content and it upload it on their site. They kept the same images (all of which were screenshots and actually had my name attached), and they included all the same links I’d originally attached—inbound links to that same site included, which pinged us with trackbacks and helped us find the stolen content.
  Some copiers will be smarter than this, so it’s not a fool proof method. Some, however, clearly will not.

The second you find stolen content, take a screenshot of it on the stolen page. Get the date in the screenshot if it’s available. If you ever need it, you now have it.

How to Get Your Stolen Content Taken Down

So we’ve found the stolen content. If you’re anything like me, it’s infuriating and frustrating. My content is my livelihood. I don’t take it lightly. Fortunately, it is possible to have the content taken down. In many cases, the site that stole your content will face consequences.

Here’s my preferred methods of getting the stolen content removed:

1. Contact the site directly. Even with my blood boiling, the first step I always take is to politely but firmly contact the site owner. Letting them know that you’ve seen the content and that you want it taken down—and are prepared to make them do so—is often enough for people to take it down, and it saves you the time from having to go through the next steps.
   There’s another big reason, though. A lot of people don’t actually realize that what they’re doing is wrong. They don’t think anything of taking content or images. They see it as free content they can use to bolster their sites—even if it’s clearly branded. If this is the case, they’ll always apologize and take down the content—and they’ll learn about why it’s not ok.
2. Contact their webhost. If contacting the site owner doesn’t work, you get to move to the next stage—contacting the host site directly. The host site has the power to remove the stolen content, which they almost always will; in some cases, they’ll even taken down the entire site.
   To find out who is hosting the site, go to whoishostingthis.com. All you have to do is type in the domain name, and they’ll tell you what hosting service they’re using.
    Each hosting service handles things differently. HostGator was a nightmare. I called and spent an hour on hold, and then was told “check the site” and hung up on. I had to mail in a request, which got lost in the mail twice. GoDaddy, however, was much better.
   If the post was published on a content sharing platform like Hubpages, contact their administration; they have the power to handle that.
3. File a DMCA complaint. If you choose to, or are struggling with the webhost, you can file a DMCA complaint with Google. This one takes more time, so I don’t recommend it as a first line of defense (hence why it’s third on the list), but it will get the stolen content removed from Google’s search engine, and can offer additional consequences for the site who stole it.

Final Thoughts

I’m grateful for the DMCA and the protection it offers; I frequently see sites replicating my content without asking my permission, asking my clients permission, or paying either me or that client for reprint fees. With the DMCA in play, I have and will continue to take measures to make sure that stolen content is taken down. Your content can be everything; it’s important to protect it.

What do you think? Do you protect your content from content theft? What tools do you use? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!