Plagiarism Today - Latest Comments in Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:16:12 -0000

Sorry to hear that it didn't work fo ryou but I'm not wholly surprised, I knew it was a very limited approach to the issue. If you need any help, send me an email and I'll see what I can suggest.

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Eszter — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:43:01 -0000

Well, it definitely doesn't work for me, tried it with four different posts.

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

plagiarismtoday — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:49:32 -0000

I am sorry to hear about your problems in this area, if I can help in any way, please let me know.

You're very welcome for the help and please let me know if there is more that I can do!

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Susan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:36:51 -0000

Dear Jonathan, I hesitated to put my website back-up because people were stealing the content from my uncle's book (used with permission) The copyright of the book was updated again during the 1990s. It would be wonderful to so many people to have the information concerning genealogy, with fun journal stories and pioneer courage. I hope I can keep studying this page and figure this out. Unfortunately, when I was uploading my pages, I avoided Java and css, thinking it was just too much to learn. Now, I need to learn better the pages in the correct resolution and need to learn Java and css, anyway. Thank you so much for your help! It will keep my family's hard work safe and not used to make someone else money, by selling it as their own. I was just sharing out of love of my family and gave complete credit to those that worked so hard for our family to have. (((hugs))) Susan Lazenby Santa Paula, California

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:16:01 -0000

Mike,

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...

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Mike Sharp — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:57:37 -0000

The problem with a CSS-based approach is that it affects accessibility, and isn't very reliable. It also requires you to implement this on every page, and doesn't protect images and non-html property.

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

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:31:29 -0000

@Mikey -
Let me know how it works for you!

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Mikey — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:39:24 -0000

Hi Jonathan. I'm glad you found my idea interesting. I might even implement it soon.

Regards,

Mikey.
www.rustylime.com

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:19:17 -0000

@jardel -
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...

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

jardel — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:47:36 -0000

it's a nice idea!

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.

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:15:12 -0000

@Will -
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!

Re: Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft

Will — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:00:19 -0000

Hi Jonathan! Maybe I am not reading the post correctly, but I am on the site and I see both the visible and hidden images?

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?