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This would be a great technique, but the flaw you point out makes it useless for the kind of message I would want to appear on a scraper's site! hehe.
But if you use it only for attribution, I would think there could be a way to come up with an image that would be unobtrusive to feed readers and provide a visual attribution link or two in the content n the scrapers site.
And if you could take it a step further and make the "hidden" content text and images and long enough, it might get around duplicate content to a small extent? In other words, don't just put in an image, but actually add some content that only appears in the feed, not on the original post. I don't know enough about how duplicate content is judged to know if this would make a difference, maybe you do?
-Will
on edit: I don't see a way to subscribe to a comment thread to get email notification of follow up comments. Did you remove it, or am I blind?
No, you're not crazy or reading anything wrong. The server suffered a VERY nasty crash last night and I have not updated everything. The CSS sheet on the site is the backup from before when the article was written, should be fixing it soon, and the plugin that does the comment subscription is not activated yet. That is one of my next things to do.
So it's all part of the damage to the crash. Fixing it as fast as I can.
Thanks for your thoughts!
other option should be this:
use the hidden class even for rss readers and do a list based on your feed subscribers of where they read the blog, then go to htaccess and disable hotlinking for these readers. I don't know, but might work, also i don't know if there will appear a broken image or it will not appear at all.
then you could do a text like "this site scrapped our content bla bla bla, if you are in a feed reader please go to http://url and ask for removal from your rss client" etc etc.
Maybe desktop readers suffer seeing the image too.
The best technique i've seen so far is the one that you put "blog by author (C) year - year" in the top, all with links and a related articles in the bottom. If someone scraps via rss, there will be a link for the blog, the author, the copyright disclaimer and more 3 or 5 links in the bottom for other articles in the same blog.
I like the idea of using htaccess but it would become a second job trying to keep up with where the readers were grabbing the feed. Some would be obvious, such as Google Reader, but every new news reader would have to be added.
In the end, I think your idea at the bottom is best, just add the copyright notice and make it as "yours" as possible. It's not perfect, but it's something...
Regards,
Mikey.
www.rustylime.com
Let me know how it works for you!
A better approach is to handle this server-side with an HTTP module (or the equivalent for your platform). This works by checking the HTTP referer header in the request. This tells your server where the user was when they made the request. If the referer header isn't your domain, then they got the image (or other stolen content) from somewhere else. (btw, referer is mis-spell, but that's the way the HTTP spec shows it.)
One way to handle hotlinked images is to replace the requested image with one that informs the viewer that they are seeing a stolen image.
For example, here's how to do it on Apache with mod_rewrite:
http://www.jibble.org/myspace-hotlinking/
Other platforms have similar approaches, and there are commercial products that can help with this as well.
Hotlinking images is a real problem, since (copyright issues aside) it costs the victim money in terms of bandwidth. Thomas Scott wrote about this back in 2004 on AListApart:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking/
Regards,
Mike Sharp
I agree that the CSS solution has serious flaws but, then again, so does any DRM technique. The solution you present, for example, won't wok on those who turn of referrals (which includes many of my privacy-buff friends) and will not work in all environments as many bloggers don't have access to their server config files.
That being said, I generally think technology solutions are a waste for many of the reasons you list, still, I discuss them for those who are interested. If you think that a technology-based approach is best, you need to decide what works for you in your situation with your needs.
You definitely present a good idea for some and I agree it is superior in many ways, but I think every method will have its limitations.
That's fair to say...
You're very welcome for the help and please let me know if there is more that I can do!