How does it feel when you found that someone has copied your blog contents without any permission?
It feels terrible. I’ve faced this situation several times. Whenever I found that content thieves rank higher in Google, I report to Google to remove copied content.
It’s a good idea. But we should be preventive about content thieves. One of the things that can protect your blog from being copied is adding a DMCA Badge to your blog.
If you aren’t aware about DMCA, here is some information for you. DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is a United States copyright law that controls to copyrighted works. The aim of DMCA is to protect the right of intellectual property online.
You can add a DMCA Protection Badge to your blog to deter content thieves and protect your content. It will make content thieves hesitate when they try to copy your contents.
Why DMCA?
- File a DMCA Takedown if your content is stolen.
- Monitor your pages through DMCA.com’s secure Portal.
- Get a DMCA.com Protection Status Certificate to deter content theft.
- Pro plan to Perform DMCA Takedowns, scan for copies of your content, find out who is ripping you off and much more.
How to Add DMCA Badge to WordPress Blog
It’s very easy to add a DMCA badge to your blog. It won’t take more than five minutes of you.
At first, go to DMCA Badges page and register your account by filling your First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Email Address.
If you want to create a free account, then just click on ‘Submit’. I would suggest you to start with free account. Later you can upgrade to Pro if needed.
Once you’ve logged to your account, you will find DMCA Protection Badge there. Though there is a WordPress Plugin that lets you install protection badges on your site, but I won’t suggest you to install a plugin just to add a badge where you can do it by adding a widget.
Now you need to select a badge and copy the code. Add a text widget in your blog sidebar/footer and paste the code there. (Quick Guide: Login to WordPress > Appearance > Widgets > Arbitrary text or HTML > Paste the Code > Add it to Sidebar/footer).
That’s it. You are done. DMCA bot will crawl your site soon and your contents will be protected under DMCA act. DMCA badge cannot stop someone to copy contents from your blog. But this badge will discourage content thieves to copy your content. If you find someone has copied your content, just ask DMCA to take action.
Read: Top 7 Free Tools to Check Duplicate Content on the Web
Hope this badge will help you to protect your contents from stealers. If you find this post useful, help me by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
9 Comments
Thanks Rayhan for such an informative post about DMCA. It is no good to install a plugin for such a small task. I agree with you on adding just code for embedding on widget area. Also, DMCA badge will discourage content scrapper or thieves big time. Content copying has become a worry for most of the original content writers.
Added DMCA badges on my website. But the DMCA team take a lot of time to review the site when anyone signup for their free plan.
If you have a WordPress site, you can the WordPress Plugin here https://wordpress.org/plugins/dmca-badge/
Should work with the latest version of WordPress.
Very nice and useful article. This helps me to add DMCA for my WordPress blog.
Thanks Istiak for sharing this helpful information, the good thing is that they offer a free option too….
Copy content from somewhere else is an unethical action and Google also hate from this kind of activity. As you said dmca can’t protect content to copy, but i think it can discourage to do that and hope so a professional blogger will think twice before using copied content.
Thanks for your Plugin idea.
Hi, Istiyak, thanks for this great and informative article. You are absolutely right that when some one stole your hard work then it is very frustrating and disappointing as well. Actually I am using common creative license for my every posts and pages. It is completely free and they don’t charge you.
DMCA has both free and premium service.
Thanks Istiak, for sharing this stuff. Now I can also protect my content from stealing…