Once upon a time, it was pretty difficult to get your message out to the world. Once upon a time you had to make your own inks out of unpleasant substances like rotting clams, and if you weren't lucky enough to be living along the Nile you had to spend weeks converting your sheepskins into writing materials. That's if you could write at all. Copying something was just barely feasible; a monk might spend months meticulously reproducing some important book. With the invention of paper and the printing press, things became easier and mass production became possible; but still pretty laborious, as you had to write and rewrite until you'd come up with your acceptable copy, then you'd hand it over to the printer who would pick individual letters out of boxes of type to assemble each page. Once all the pages were done and collated (you hoped in the right order!) they were taken to the bookbinding expert. The typewriter and type-setting machines like the Linotype improved things still further, along with automated bookbinding machines. You still had to work hard and carefully to get to your fair copy, though. With the advent of the first clunky IBM PC's and the word processor, it was suddenly easy to make printer-ready copy. And so it went.
Now, of course, it's much easier than that. Once the Internet was invented, all the barriers were removed. Paper is not involved in online publishing. You can buy a $400 PC with the appropriate software, or get a knowledgeable friend or a webmaster service to help, make up your own particular message and its presentation, and get a web server. Voila — the entire on-line world is now potentially reading what you have to say. Whether its stories about your cat or articles promoting your business, all the world is your potential audience.
Still, nothing's perfect. Theft and misappropriation have always been a plague on honest creators, and that certainly hasn't changed. Yet there's a qualitative difference in theft now, on the Internet. It used to be that theft was a physical thing, that somebody had to whack you upside the head or crash through your study door to rob you: in other words, you would know all about it. But with Internet publishing, you might never find out. All your effort, creativity, and skull sweat can be swiped right out from under your nose without your ever knowing.
That is, until you begin to notice the effects of that theft — that visits to your web site have declined precipitously, or that fewer orders or product inquiries are coming in. Investigating, you'll find that your site is no longer being picked up favorably by the search engines, or that it might have been dropped from the rankings altogether. (The search engine Google, among others, has a procedure to detect sites that are suspiciously similar to others and to downgrade those that appear to be copied from others;. This is known as a "duplicate content penalty". Digital thieves can hijack your site and fiddle with it just enough to make it appear that they were there first, even though you know that you were there first!) People just might not be finding your site any more. In the worst case you might be accused of theft — of your own site! All of this can be dispiriting if not actually disastrous.
What can you do? How can you protect yourself? That's what I'm here to help you with.
As with the world itself, nothing's perfect, not even ways of protecting yourself. But you can make it clear to potential hijackers that you're on the lookout for them, and if they're brazen enough to ignore your warnings you will at least have some recourse in law. No law has ever stopped criminals, of course, but with the correct precautions you can get back at them.
I refer to copyrighting your site. By registering the copyright of your web site, you have the agreement of the government that you did in fact create what's on your site by a particular a date and can prove it; that you're not infringing on somebody else's work; and that you are entitled to demand compensation or can sue for damages if someone does rip you off. Registering your site's copyright takes some time and costs a bit of money, but it is worth it in sheer self-protection and peace of mind. And if you're on good terms with your children you can benefit them long after you're in a position to create anything ever again! This guide will show you how to do it.