Digital Fingerprints Help Track Blog Content Theft

In an attempt to help bloggers track down content theft and copyright violations, MaxPower.ca has created the Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin for full version WordPress blogs.

The plugin injects a “digital fingerprint” manually into your posts which is seen only in your feeds, not in the post itself.

Install and activate the Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin as you would any other WordPress Plugin. It adds a tabbed panel to your Manage panel. The first time you access it, an error will be reported at the top reminding you that you haven’t created your unique digital fingerprint. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and enter some unique text into the digital fingerprint section.

The Digital Fingerprint Detecting WordPress Plugin works by adding unique content to your feeds. If your feed content shows up on any blog that is patrolled by Google BlogSearch, Feedster, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Sphere, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, the Plugin searches for the unique phrase and displays search results with that phrase in the Digital Fingerprint panel.

Unlike a barcode or some assigned number, the digital fingerprint you set in the Plugin is a combination of words, letters, and/or numbers that doesn’t quite look like “normal” searchable text. Maxpower explains the digital fingerprint in “Choosing a Digital Fingerprint That is Right For Me”. Since the text will appear in your feed, what should it be? It needs to be unique, distinctive from other phrases people are likely to use in their blogs, while not looking too strange.

For my example here, I’ve used the following:

[copyright feed content de Taking Your Camera on the Road – no commercial use permitted]

The use of “de” as the Spanish “from” in combination with the other words makes the statement readable, but also not a typical combination of words. Here are some other examples to help you customize your digital fingerprint text to your own needs:

• > > Feed content from My Blog Site – Copyright and License 3451234
• [Feed copyright My Blog Site and My Name Smith, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.]
• Cheer up and dance while reading the copyright protected feed from My Blog Site – boogiefunhere
• M¥ B£09 $173 – (“My Blog Site” in Leet/L337 Speak)

Come up with something unique that when searched, would only result in your blog being found and enter it in the digital fingerprint form and update the settings.

While I wish every post going out from my site would automatically have this unique digital fingerprint inserted just before the post text, you have to manually add it to your posts. This means past posts have to be edited to add the digital fingerprint as well as adding it to new posts as you blog.

In the Write Post panel, a new button will appear to insert the digital fingerprint code which is:

<--fingerprint-->

Put your cursor at the end of a sentence or paragraph in the top section of your post content, in place that makes sense if someone is reading the feed, but close enough to the top to be picked up by search engines which may only scan the top third of your web page content into its database. Click on the fingerprint button and the comment code will be inserted.

Save the post and test this by viewing the post on your blog. You should see nothing in the spot where you inserted the digital fingerprint code.

Check your feed and you should see the text inserted automatically into the feed. (Highlighted in image)

In a week or more, check in with the Digital Fingerprint panel to see if your post content shows up where it shouldn’t be. If you find a bunch of unrelated posts showing up with your “unique” phrase, it’s obviously not unique enough. You may be lucky and never see your writing illegally published, but with the recent scam of bitacle.org, the likelihood of your blog’s content getting scrapped through its feeds increases.

This is not a fool proof method of stopping content scrappers, plagiarists, and content thieves, but it does help your blog post pop up in search results to you can keep track of your posts just in case they do pop up on a search engine or directory.

One of the neat options the Plugin features is the ability to add your digital fingerprint to Google Alerts, so Google will automatically send you an email whenever your digital fingerprint phrase shows up in their search engine results.

You can do this manually without a WordPress Plugin. Just type in some unique phrase consistently into your post content that doesn’t interfere with your readers’ reading, then search various search engines and/or Copyscape once in awhile to see if your posts show up in other blogs. You could use the popular Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter WordPress Plugin to automatically add a copyright message of your own design to your feeds from your WordPress blog, or the Better Feed WordPress Plugin by FrenchFragFactory allows you to add text and other elements to your feeds.

While fairly easy to add unique text to your feeds, it’s much harder and more time consuming to search through all the various search engines, directories, and blog search services to find your unique phrase. The Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin makes the process much faster and easier.

I’ll be talking about some other copyright protection efforts you can take to protect your blog content soon, so stay tuned.

Related Articles

• What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content
• Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements
• The Growing Trends in Content Theft
• Splogging or Clogging: The Worst of the Worst of Blogging
• Blogs That Look Like Blogs But Ain’t – Splogs
• How To Spot a Splog
• Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging
• Comments on Comment Spam
• What are Feeds?
• The Bitacle Battle of Blogs

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network