DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is a copyright law which protects online content. When you are running a professional blog you need to make sure that someone else is not copying your content. In this post, I will discuss how you can use DMCA to protect the posts, pages and overall content of your blog.
There are two options to enable DMCA protection for your blog:
1) DMCA Free plan: This is a basic plan and you need to create an account with DMCA, add your blog and download and activate the necessary plugin. Here are the features of a free DMCA account:
a) Custom badges: You can place a custom badge in your blog. This is a highly customizable badge which you can edit it to match it with your blog. It protects your blog from online content theft.
b) Asking DMCA to take down stolen content: In a free account you can contact DMCA once in a year to take down stolen content from your blog.
c) Turn off right clicks: When you add a badge to your blog visitors won’t be able to right-click on your blog. This is one of the best ways to stop content thieves.
d) Plugins: DMCA provides plugins for WordPress and Blogger. All you have to do is to install and activate the plugin in WordPress or Blogger.
2) DMCA Pro plan: If you want more features and want to provide iron clad security for your blog then pro plan would be more appropriate. Here are the extra features of a pro DMCA account:
a) Asking DMCA to take down stolen content: In a pro account you can contact DMCA ten times in a year to take down stolen content from your blog.
b) DIY take downs You can also create and send your own take down requests to people who have stolen your content. There are plethora of tools available like “website detective” and “auto-generating take down forms” which you can use for this purpose. Website detective is useful in finding the contact information of the person who is publishing your stolen content.
c) Image watermark: This is one of the best features of the pro account. You can watermark all the images of you blog in a single shot. You can set up your logo to be used as the watermark in the images. Also, the images are served using a CDN, thus your blog will be loading faster than usual.
d) Certificates: There’s a certificate assigned for each page of your blog and it is indexed by the DMCA. Thus, every page of your blog is verified by the DMCA. It discourages the content thieves to steal your blog content.
e) Copy scan: This is one of the most powerful features of DMCA. To look for copied content, all you need to do is login to your account and start the scan. DMCA will scan the web for copies of your content and generate the result. Then, you can manually take down stolen content from your blog by contacting the respective parties.