How to Prevent Your Website From Being Copied
The short answer is: NO! You cannot prevent your website from being copied. Your website is in its basic form an idea that is publicly displayed online and available to anyone with internet access. Your purpose for creating your website is to spread your idea to a global audience as much as possible and restricting access to it from anyone defeats its purpose.
Anyone with enough time and technology knowhow can copy your website word for word, style by style, content by content and so on. The only ironclad rule for not getting your website content from getting stolen, copied, manipulated and so on is not to publish it online. Do not post content online you do not want others to know about. Keep them to yourself.
Though you may not be able to prevent your website content from being copied you can at least slow them down especially those with limited technology knowhow:
Report the website that copied your content:
Though this does not prevent your website content from being copied in the first place this is the absolute action you do once your website content has been copied. You get the hosting provider for the offending website by searching for the Google term “how to know website hosting provider” for one. From here you issue a DMCA complaint and provide proofs that your website content has been copied.
Many online articles and forums suggest this action and many report that this quite effective. Hosting providers would often comply rather than risk being served legal notice. However as you can see this is quite tedious as you need to constantly search the internet for any websites that copy content from your website. This does not also prevent your website content from being copied in the first place.
Another issue is that if there are many website copying your content serving DMCA notices to these companies and their hosting companies can get tedious. These websites who copy your content can just manipulate or redesign your content until it has been changed enough it is completely a new content. The advise again is do not put out content or ideas that you do not want copied.
Making your website hard to copy at least:
For images and videos in your website that you do not want to be copied one of the deterrents for it not being copied is to put a watermark on it. You can put your name or your company’s name on the watermark together with the notice “property of:” you can even put in warnings such as “unauthorised use can result in legal prosecution” to further remind would be copiers of the wrong thing they are doing.
You could also put watermarks randomly in your text content though watermarks are less effective on text content. The negative thing about watermarks is that they distract the viewers of your website from the actual contents of your website. Aesthetically bad watermarks can also reduce the visual appeal of your website.
For those with a bit of technology knowhow you can put most of your content in the server side of your website system. HTML and CSS can easily be copied but server side scripts of websites are not seen unless a website copier actually hacks the website being copied. Remember though that the results of these server side scripts are displayed on websites and the website copier can just develop their own server side scripts.
Website developers can also program their websites so that their website contents such as images and text would not be copied or downloaded using the Right Click Button/Command of the browser. However tech savvy website content copiers can also get around this barrier to copying website contents.
Websites can also be designed such that they or parts of them can only be accessed using a login name and password system or a paywall. However this severely limits the exposure of your websites to as many users as possible. Many website viewers are turned off by these restrictive website viewing techniques.
What is the Purpose of Your Website?:
The purpose of for example e-commerce websites is to be the online marketplace for people selling and buying products. Their website ideas and content get copied but these website are more about process than ideas that stealing their text content for example is not a major concern.
The purpose of many general information websites however is to propagate general knowledge and copying and rehashing their contents until it becomes an entirely new form is not uncommonly being done by a lot of people. There are already so many online content that there are many similarities among them. Content online continually gets added and improved and improving another person’s content is just normal.
It is wrong when people copy online content from a website very similarly and post it as their own in their website without improving on it. Only fresh ideas are unique and sure not to be copied from somewhere. The bad thing about this thinking is that there are millions of content all over the internet and your supposedly unique content may already exist.
Conclusion
What do you do then? Aside from the mentioned techniques in this article one must resign to the fact that if your content is good enough for someone they will copy it in one form or another. The technique is only posting content online that you would freely give to your viewers at no cost. You do not post content that you would want to be compensated for. Easier said than done.