How To Stop Content Stealing?

[Chris]

No, I just sent an email and fax to their host's legal dept (it was Rackspace).

[Chris]

You know, just Googling around, its amazing how many of my articles have been copied....

[r2d2]

Let us know how it went...

Just checked now, and the index page of the copy of my site now redirects to the homepage: http://realestate.bizhat.com/guide/index.php

Will check email later to see if they said anything...

[ASP-Hosting.ca]

You know, just Googling around, its amazing how many of my articles have been copied....

Are you going to deal with all of these? It can be really time consuming to do this on a regular basis...

[James]

You know, just Googling around, its amazing how many of my articles have been copied....

I don't think it's very amazing. Your sites are mostly pretty high-profile, easily found in search engines, and the infringers are probably just searching for the same thing your visitors are, then copying. Now, what'd be amazing is someone copying entries from my blog. (Note: it syndicates great big blog so the copyright google thing would probibaly show that in the results) Though in the past I have seen some small sites who have had their content stolen. Not even very high quality content, either.

[incka]

I think there is some rule about enforcing your copyright or loosing it, or maybe that is patents...

[Cutter]

Its trademarks that you need to enforce.

Thats the reason why a companies are sueing any website that might have their domain in their name even if the site poses no threat at all to them. If some time in the future they want to get rid of a site that really is threatening their brand, but there are a bunch of other sites using their name in the domain, they will most likely lose the case because they haven't been enforcing their trademark.

[moonshield]

the content theives = the scum of the net

[seafoam]

1. Check User Agents and redirect the bad ones elsewhere.

No legitimate program allows user agent changing, if you can change your user agent the program is theft-ware. Its like calling trojan horses remote administration tools.

Anyways, for those who do change the user agent, you can't do it (unless you know their user agent is still fake, for instance if it is blank, or just says "Mozilla" or something like that.)

How would you go about doing this? I've been looking for a way to prevent my site from being snaked by offline browsers/site grabbers.

[Chris]

I do this:

$agent = strtolower($HTTP_USER_AGENT);
if ((strstr($agent, "rip")) ||
(strstr($agent, "get")) ||
(strstr($agent, "icab")) ||
(strstr($agent, "wget")) ||
(strstr($agent, "lwp-request")) ||
(strstr($agent, "Wg")) ||
(strstr($agent, "ninja")) ||
(strstr($agent, "Wget/")) ||
(strstr($agent, "reap")) ||
(strstr($agent, "subtract")) ||
(strstr($agent, "offline")) ||
(strstr($agent, "xaldon")) ||
(strstr($agent, "ecatch")) ||
(strstr($agent, "msiecrawler")) ||
(strstr($agent, "rocketwriter")) ||
(strstr($agent, "httrack")) ||
(strstr($agent, "track")) ||
(strstr($agent, "teleport")) ||
(strstr($agent, "teleport pro")) ||
(strstr($agent, "webzip")) ||
(strstr($agent, "extractor")) ||
(strstr($agent, "lepor")) ||
(strstr($agent, "copier")) ||
(strstr($agent, "disco")) ||
(strstr($agent, "capture")) ||
(strstr($agent, "anarch")) ||
(strstr($agent, "snagger")) ||
(strstr($agent, "downloader")) ||
(strstr($agent, "superbot")) ||
(strstr($agent, "strip")) ||
(strstr($agent, "block")) ||
(strstr($agent, "saver")) ||
(strstr($agent, "webdup")) ||
(strstr($agent, "webhook")) ||
(strstr($agent, "webdup")) ||
(strstr($agent, "pavuk")) ||
(strstr($agent, "interarchy")) ||
(strstr($agent, "blackwidow")) ||
(strstr($agent, "w3mir")) ||
(strstr($agent, "plucker")) ||
(strstr($agent, "naver")) ||
(strstr($agent, "cherry"))){
//    $LogFile = '/home/aspen0/public_html/.htaccess';

            //    $rad = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];


            //    $logline = "deny from ". $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "\n";

            //$file = fopen("$LogFile", "a");
            //flock($file, 2);
            //fwrite($file, "$logline");
            //flock($file, 3);
            //fclose($file); 
            header("Location: http://www.online-literature.com/banned/banned.php"); 

The commented out lines are where I made an autoban. So that if someone used a ripper, then turned it off or tried to change the user agent, they'd be banned in .htaccess.

My .htaccess files got huge though, and many people on shared ips (like aol users) were banned.

[moonshield]

that is awesome, thanks a lot.

[moonshield]

Chris, how does one go about implementing this script? Just Include it? That did not work very well for me.

[Chris]

If you use the header() redirect the php needs to be processed before any text/html is outputted.

[moonshield]

oh, okay that makes sense. thanks.