Copyright Superheroes
Web Design • September 23rd, 2006Recently I had to deal with yet one more episode of thieves plagiarizing my work. Flying out of the clouds, with a virtual superhero cape, Jonathan Bailey came to the rescue. Jonathan is the author of Plagiarism Today, a wonderful resource for all things online plagiarism. Thanks to his help, I was able to quickly react to the offense seeking to remove the copied content from the plagiarist’s web site — since this cat thought he could talk in mellow voices and have me stay perfectly cool with him using my stuff for as long as he cared to keep it up there… The plagiarist was finally forced to remove the copied content, and as a side effect of the whole ordeal, I’ve added a few more “secret weapons” to my copyright protection kit. All thanks to Jonathan.
One of the tools I would like to discuss here because I think many of you could use it, is Numly. First of all, before I give you more details I’d like to say: If you’re sitting there thinking this subject is not for you, because you think you don’t have content worthy of being stolen, let me tell you: You are wrong. Maybe you don’t have an original web design to get ripped off, or a professional reputation to protect, but the words you write on your blog, great or not, personal or not, important or not… could well be scrapped by one of the many spam blogs that are starting to pester the Internet. Lorelle VanFossen has written plenty about them, beginning by her latest post.
Keep blogging and posting content to the Internet, and one day I guarantee it, you will find your post about sweet Joelle or dear Luke, or Peanut joining the immigrant boycott in a pile of posts sitting by thousands of flashy ads generating revenue for a lazy plagiarist. Or, write something nice that any stranger may like, and you may find it on somebody else’s blog with Joelle’s name changed to “Ashley”, and signed by “Tracy” as the author.
If this scenario doesn’t bother you, oh well, I guess you’re more spiritually evolved than I am. But I have no tolerance for intellectual property theft, whatever their lame reason… Jonathan Bailey wrote a great article describing The Five Kinds of Plagiarists discussing their motivation and how to deal with each one. It bothers me deeply that vocal defenders of plagiarism (probably plagiarists themselves) always argue the issue of copyright infringement by saying:
“If you don’t want anybody to use it, then don’t post it to the Internet”
What a load of crap! The solution my friends is not to let the bastards win… I choose to keep using the Internet but do all I can to protect what I can protect, knowing that one day something will still get stolen, and I’ll have to react, hopefully next time with more ease and less drama.
So, after the long winded introduction, let me tell you about Numly and how it can help you.
Numly Numbers
The minute you publish original material to any medium (Internet included), intellectual property rights begin to protect you. You don’t need to have a copyright notice, or register your copyright with the government. If you can prove that you are the original author of something, you own the copyright: here, and in Cafarnaum. It helps if you do have a copyright notice (free), and it also helps if you register your copyright. But registering copyrights for everything you publish can get expensive… not to mention, it’s a process you probably don’t want to repeat every time you write a post, or upload artwork. Some of us have documentation and assets that we could use to prove copyright ownership of some of our work, but I’ve actually never had to produce evidence to know how this all works. This is where Numly comes to the rescue.
By submitting work to Numly (an online process) you immediately receive an Electronic Serial Number (ESN) which is stored and managed by Numly. At the moment of submission your record is also date stamped, and that date is kept (unlike Google’s cache date which gets updated constantly). So, if three months from now you find that your work has been stolen, you have indisputable proof that you published such work at least three months ago, before the plagiarist copied it from you. Reacting to plagiarism doesn’t always involve getting a lawyer. All you have to do if the plagiarist doesn’t cooperate is to contact the hosting company telling them the work is copyrighted and belongs to you, and usually they will take it down. It’s nice to know that you’ll have indisputable third-party evidence should you ever need it.
For WordPress bloggers, Numly has a nice plugin that generates ESNs the minute you push the “Publish” button. So, voila: You get immediate protection as soon as you first publish. No thieve can beat that… Well.. maybe, but we’d be getting on obscure spying cases. A caveat here is that Numly truncates text content longer than 5000 characters, so only the first 5000 characters of your post get that indisputable evidence… If you write short posts this is not a big deal. But if you write a little longer like I usually do, the plugin unfortunately is not the perfect solution.
What I do instead is to take a screenshot of the post page, and manually submit it to Numly. That way I’m protecting not only my full content, but also the design used to present it, and any images included with the post. It’s a little manual, and I would love it if Numly dropped the character limit, or Cal Evans (author of the plugin), enhanced the Numly plugin to break posts and generate as many ESNs as needed to protect the whole post… Or if some bright developer created something to make this process any easier. But in the meantime I do it, and think it’s all worth it.
If you’re hosting your own installation of WordPress, and if you write relatively short posts, installing the Numly plugin is a no-brainer… Kind of like investing the maximum allowed on your 401K.
If you are hosted by wordpress.com, unfortunately you can’t install any plugins. I wonder if somebody has requested to add this functionality to their service… You still can submit your post manually through a quick web form and get protected. And Numly also offers a Firefox extension to generate ESNs. I haven’t used it, though.
Superheroes Needed
If a big part of your life involves creating original content (art, writing, design, photography, etc), and if protecting your rights and ownership on such content is important to you, I whole-heartedly recommend considering Numly’s service, and adding Plagiarism Today to your daily reading.
I can only pray for more superheroes to join the fight against plagiarism… I’m tired of finding new evil tools created by smart developers in order to grab and mirror our web content and work. These developers take great pride in their creations, and I just wonder: Why can’t they use their powers for good instead of evil?… There is a market out there: I’ll pay for tools to defend myself from intellectual property theft. Wouldn’t you, if your original creations are the way how you feed your family or build your reputation?
