WordPress Copyright Hacks. How to Prevent Image, Video & Copy Theft

Everyone who creates content faces the risk of coming across his texts, videos or images on other blogs or sites. As a content writer, I am mainly focused on the message that I want to deliver to the readers through my texts. Tools and extensions go into the background when I work on a new publication.

If you are a content writer like me, then you should know that feeling when you put the soul into your content, and then someone comes and steals your data without even giving you a credit when they paste the copied text on other web pages. In order for this not to happen and make you feel safe for all pieces of content from your WordPress blog or site, you should be aware of the WordPress copyright tools that will keep your data protected.

The topics that are highlighted in this post include:

• Image Theft
• Video Theft
• Copy Theft

I will give you both useful WordPress copyright hacks on how to protect your content. There are also some useful recommendations on the WordPress plugins that will keep your data safe.

Image Theft

WordPress blog themes and sites are not only about the written content. Image theft is one of the most popular types of thefts that happen on the web. The easiest way to steal an image is to simply right click on it and select a place where you want the image to be saved. Every image that can be opened in the new browser window can be "stolen".

The laziest method of the image theft is hotlinking. The technique suggests that a person uses the actual link to an image from your web page or blog post on his own site. The worst thing about this image theft method is that a thief doesn't even save an image from your site to upload it to a different place. Linking back to your images will cost you bandwidth, which is so valuable to everyone working on the web.

In order to prevent the image theft on your site, you will need to disable the right click option first of all. This will stop an average user to steal artworks from your site, thus excluding the possibility of the copyright violation.

How to do this? There are plenty of plugins available on the web. One of them is Envira Gallery Lite. This is a responsive image gallery plugin for WordPress. It features a usable drag-and-drop builder, which allows you to create responsive photo galleries that can also protect your images from being stolen. In order to Enable image protection, create the image gallery with the plugin and select the respective option in the settings panel. The tool will disable the right-click option on your images.

You can also use watermarks on images. This is the anti-theft technique that you can find on the majority of the stock photography sites. With its help, one can detect the source from where the images were saved and used illegally.

There is also an option to add a copyright notice to your site. As a rule, it is placed in the footer of a blog or website. To do this, add a copywriting notice in the footer file using a text like this:

<p>&copy; 2002-2018 templatemonster.com</p>

Do not forget to update it every New Year.

Whatever type of content you share on the web, you are the creator of your work and the only person who has the legal right to redistribute it through other channels. If someone tries to steal your data, he violates the copyright laws and is due to being punished.

If for some reason you need to find free images that can be used for your personal or commercial purposes, you can refer to the free stock image platforms like Pixabay and Pexels. These two are my personal favorite.

Video Theft

Video content is on the rise today, if your site is video-based, then the video anti-theft hacks are exactly what you need to care about. What do I mean? I am talking about the unique video content like online guides, tutorials, lectures, training courses, etc. that are provided on your website exclusively. In fact, the situation with videos is pretty much similar to the image theft. A person can grab your content with the right-mouse click. There are also lots of the browser extensions, which enable the users to steal your data with a few clicks.

One of the top WordPress copyright hacks to secure video content is to use video anti-theft plugins. Here are top 3 of the most popular extensions in the community.

WP Content Copy Protection

This WordPress anti-theft plugin features lots of useful techniques that can prevent your site's content from being copied. The plugin disables such most common features as right-click, source code viewing, image drag-drop-save, CTRL + A, C, X, U, S, and P, etc. The plugin prevents the default right-click and save functions on the video and audio embeds.

S3 Media Maestro Plugin

This is probably one of the most powerful content protection plugins on the web. It is integrated with Amazon Web Services, allowing you to manage S3-hosted media right from the dashboard of your WordPress site. With its help, you can embed S3 hosted content on your WP posts and pages. In addition to making your data look perfectly well on the smaller screens, it also protects the content from being shared by the users who do not pay for it.

Text Theft

Texts are the most common pieces of content that can be found on WordPress blogs and business sites. Those are the written texts that face the risk of being copied from one page and pasted on another. It's easy to steal content from the unprotected sites. You should know how it's done. You simply select a piece of text with the mouse and then press Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard. You can paste the text wherever you want afterward.

It's a common case when someone copies articles from your site and simply places them on their own web resources, without even giving you a credit. In order to prevent this from happening, go ahead and install copy anti-theft plugins on our site.

Yoast SEO

This is one of the most popular plugins that are used in the majority of WordPress-based sites. With its help, you can not only optimize the content and pages of your WordPress web resource for the better performance in the search engines but also protect your data from being stolen. Yoast SEO provides an RSS menu, which allows you include any type of content before and after your post. The moment when someone copies your content and adds it to a different site, the plugin will provide a link to your post. This will notify the readers who published the article originally.

WP Content Copy Protection

The plugin provides universal content protection solutions that cannot be found in any different WordPress copyright extension. With its help, you can disable the possibility to select and copy texts from your site, right-click or context menu, saving images from your site, etc. The advanced and easy-to-use control panel allows you to disable CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+X, CTRL+S or CTRL+V.

The plugin includes free and pro versions. The paid version includes watermarking, supports jquery and overlay protection, shows alert messages when a user right-clicks on the content, etc.

Website Copy Protection

Adding the copy protection plugin to your site will make it impossible for the copy thieves to steal your texts, download images, use the right-click option, view source code, etc. The activation of the plugin is a one-click option. Disabling the functionality is just as easy.

Final Warnings

Everyone who works with the content faces the risk of the written or visual data to be re-used on external web resources illegally. The better content you provide and the more popular your WordPress blog or site becomes, the higher are the risks of the copyright violation attempts. In order for this not to happen and keep your data protected from the thieves, install content anti-theft plugins on your site and share your artworks with a piece of mind.

Are there other cool copy protection hacks and plugins that you use on your WordPress site. Feel free to share them via comments.