Thanks, deathshadow60;4717857, What are the recommended ways of copyrighting it for free as you suggest above please ?
Thanks Stephen, it’s appreciated. Do all pdf programmes come with the facility of copy protection ? I can’t seem to find that in my pdf nitro professional ?
Also, is text in pdf’s easily found by the googlebots ?
If your country is part of the international agreement on copyright then any original work is copyrighted to the originator automatically.
Of course, you have to have some way of later proving that you are the originator in order to enforce your copyright, but the copyright itself is atomatic in most countries including, now, the USA.
If someone really wants it, they’ll find a way to steal your content.
I’ve seen several PDFs archived by Google. But you can always use robots.txt to tell robots not to indes your PDFs.
An old-fashion, but perfectly valid way of copyrighting something is to put hard-copies and/or digital copies (like a CD) in an envelope and then mail it to yourself. When you receive them again, do not open them, just store them away.
Then, if someone takes your content, you can go to a lawyer and let them open one of the envelopes to prove it was yours. The letter will have an official government time stamp on the letter to prove when you did it.
As for protecting it online, my recommendation would be: don’t.
If they copy it, it’ll show up in a search engine. Just routinely google your content, if it shows up, tell them to take it down. If they don’t, sue them.
It is of course quite true that there is no way to stop determined people from copying your content. There are minor deterrents that can be employed though, such as disabling right-click with javascript or overlaying the entire page with a transparent gif. I’ve even seen a script that blanks the source code when you click “view source” (though the authors had the bad taste to replace the source code with an irresponsible accusation of attempted copyright infringement and an empty threat to send your IP address to the government :))
None of these tricks is capable of stopping anybody, but they might at least discourage some of the more casual content scrapers and send them looking for a softer target.
In NitroPDF Professional (v5, similar in v6, I’m sure), you can add security to your created PDF document by clicking on the Secure & Sign tab, followed by the Password Security icon. You can password protect the whole document, and/or restrict the ability of the user to perform certain actions, eg Copy the text.
All these security features can, of course, be overcome by people who really want to.
Paul
Yep, that’s always been the case - but it’s possible to make it as hard as possible.
Can you give any examples ? I’ve not seen any.
Many thanks Paul, that’s very useful. Would google/yahoo etc, still index the text on the pdf please ? Would add, that for this purpose, it wouldn’t be password protected, but the ability to copy text for example, wouldn’t be available.
Yeah, if it’s material which is that sensitive, it shouldn’t be on a website. Contact publishers and agents and get it published. If it’s possible for Internet Explorer can figure out what it says, you’d better believe that everyone else can get at it too.
The only other alternative I would see is a New York Times like solution. You have to pay for any article that’s more than a week old or so. If you published it like that for a fee, then that might work. It’s possible to use cloaking to allow bots in, but provide login only access to users. It’s still a bit sketchy SEO, but, like I said, NYT and a number of places have been using this technique for years and Google is still spidering their cloaked content all this time. I believe Matt Cutts has even said something to the effect that “not all cloaking is evil” though Google has never provided any real definitions as to where the line between legitimate and black hat cloaking exactly lies.
So basically all I need to do is send an empty, unsealed envelope to myself to get the official government seal. Now I just wait for somebody to publish some really awesome text content and get rich. Now I copy the text, put it on a CD and edit the digital timestamps, put it in the envelope and seal it, and then bring it to my lawyer with a plausible story about my life’s work being stolen?
Do you have an example of somebody who has actually used this method and won a case successfully in court?
Seems that paying a Notary Public the few dollars might be a good idea.
There’s an underlying problem here: humans are still better at reading and accessing text online than search engine spiders. So if you make something harder to copy, you’ll make it harder for spiders before you make it harder for people.
And as for examples of indexed PDFs, try this search:
http://www.google.com.au/#q=Expertise%3A+Long+Term+View+of+Water+and+Security
The first result (for me anyway) is a PDF document. You can also just add
filetype:pdf
to any search in Google to return only PDF results.
golden rule… once published, you have no more control
Summary: if you publish it on the net (in any form), it can be copied !
The only alternative is to only publish parts of it, focusing on the most important parts for the spiders, and then let people download a protected PDF from you.
But people will STILL be able to share it and copy it - and most people will probably not even bother to try to read your material if you try to protect it too much…
Publish it all in an easily accessible format to get as many readers as possible, and just add a copyright at the bottom in case it is mis-used…
Don’t even try. Someone said that the biggest flattery is through plagiarism. If your article or research becomes popular enough, they’ll know who the original author is. If I were you, I’d do the opposite and provide links to PDF file or ms word, etc… Then water mark the document w/ your name on it.
Hello.
Meybe You can disable RIGHT button, example. Nepremičnine
Meybe You can use STYLES to disable TO SELECT TEXT, example Copy last text line
Meybe You can use JavaScript to decode encode text, search engine without decode encode.