How to Secure Your Working from Stealing

You’ve probably heard horror stories of people who work hard on significant pieces of work with the aim of revolutionizing how people think and see things. Anxious to publish their work, the writer publishes it on a blog hoping to get feedback. But somebody loves their work so much that they decide to steal it. They change minor details and use it as their own and end up profiting from stolen work.

Generally, plagiarism is one of the severe problems with epidemic proportions. Somebody can easily copy online content on a webpage and spread it like it is their own. Nevertheless, it is possible to secure your work from being stolen. After working hard to come up with a great piece or even seeking thesis help, you want to get maximum returns from your investment. Here are some useful tips to help you secure your work from being stolen.

Tips to Secure your work from being Stolen

1. Date and Save Your Original Work

The most important way to secure your work from being stolen is ensuring that you save dated copies of your original work. You can do this in different ways. For instance, print out the work and have it notarized. You can even mail yourself the work to ensure that it features a postmark date. You can say it’s like a poor man’s copyright. Alternatively, save the original version on your computer correctly. These are essential actions which will help you in case you have to go to court over work theft though they might not be enough on their own. Essentially, having copyright for your work is the only way to prove that you own the work.

2. Register with the Copyright Office

Technically, the law stipulates that the work which a person creates belongs to them. As such, if somebody else takes your work and uses it as theirs, the act amounts to copyright infringement. Nevertheless, you also need extra protection. There many non-official websites which claim to provide copyright to the individual’s work. It’s advisable that you avoid such sites and work with the Copyright Office. The cost per submission varies from one country or state to another.

3. Include Copyright Notices in Blogs

If you decide to publish your work on a blog or website, make sure that it has a copyright notice. However, you should do this after registering the work. Just like an alarm system warning, a copyright notice will not scare every thief. However, it will deter most thieves.

4. Develop a Unique Writing Style

Develop a unique voice or writing style which makes your work hard for other people to steal. A distinctive style will make your work unique and difficult for thieves to use as their work. When you have a unique voice or style, your work will also shine, and people will recognize it with ease and alert you in case of theft. Nevertheless, developing a distinctive style requires practice. You must keep writing in a unique style to master and make it better.

5. Publish Everything with Your Name

Some thieves are merely lazy including how they steal and use the work of other people. For instance, somebody can use technology to scrape content from a website and use it the way it is even without minor edits. When you include your name in every piece of your work, thieves who use this method will find stealing and using it harder.

6. Watermark Images

If your work has custom images, watermark them to secure them from being stolen. Watermarking is directly placing some text or logo on top of your pictures. Generally, nobody will be interested in stealing your images if they have names of the owner plastered on them and pass them on as their own. You can have subtle or obtrusive watermarks depending on what you prefer. But, no matter how you do it, watermarking images deters most thieves. If readers find your watermarked images published elsewhere, the action will serve as a red flag.

7. Use WordPress Plug-in

If you want to publish your work on a blog or website which runs on WordPress, use plug-ins which are designed to help you protect it from theft. For instance, use Copyright Proof which generates a time-stamped certificate for the posts you publish. The certificate is digitally signed and incredibly helpful when it comes to proving ownership of the work.

You can also use WP Content Copy Protection to secure your work from stealing by disabling the right clicks as well as the ability to drag and drop the images on your page. Many people drag images and drop them without thinking. Therefore, disabling this action is a great way to defend your work from such thieves.

8. Use Google Alerts

If you have a Gmail account, you can monitor the internet for content with specific keywords or phrases. Google Alerts will notify you through the email automatically once your chosen terms appear after setting up Google Alerts.

To protect your work, set up alerts whenever you post or publish it online. Let Google Alerts search for a unique, complete sentence in your text. This enables you to avoid being overwhelmed with false alerts. Adjust the settings of your alerts to ensure that you are notified anything which relates to your sentence when published. Google Alerts allows you to set up different searches.

If you notice that somebody has used your work, request credit. If you can’t find contact information from the offending blog or website, use online tools to find the owner of the blog or website. Most providers of hosting services remove duplicated work unlawfully more willingly than amateur webmasters.