Preventing Image Theft & Copyright Violation

January 21, 2011 / Digital Marketing, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Stop Image TheftCopyright law exists to protect the creators of a original work, whether than be an article, a photo or a drawing. As soon as you create it you have copyright to it, which stays in place 70 years after the author’s death; at that point it belongs to the public domain. Unless you grant license for someone else to use your image, it is considered a copyright violation if they use without your permission.

Image theft is an important issue on the web, especially to people who make their living creating visual art.  Just this week there was a furor over the site http://lxixixl.com/ which was copying and hosting entire collections of images from people’s websites. Complaints shut it down but there are others that are doing the same thing.

Theft of content and image happens every day on the web, so what can you do?

  • Inform:   Show that it is your original work by placing a copyright notice on your website.   For example “Copyright 2011 Pablo Picasso”
  • Make it less desirable: Many artists will only put low resolution copies of their images online.   So if they are stolen they are not of full quality.
  • Make it difficult: Implement functionality that makes it harder to steal the images.   For example, disable the right click functionality with javascript.  Note this will annoy some visitors who expect the right click to work for legitimate uses.  Another approach is to place a transparent image over the real image, so when it is saved the thief gets a blank image.   WordPress users might want to check out the iProtect plugin.   Keep in mind that that neither one of these are complete solutions.   Disabling right click doesn’t help when the thief finds the image in Google Image Search and gets the image there.  Which brings me to ….
  • Hide them from Google and Bing: Keep all your images in one directory and tell Google and Bing not to index that directory by placing a directive in the robots.txt file.   Note that this action is useless if Google has already indexed your images.
  • Watermark them: Perhaps the most effective solution, this alters the image so that it is “marked” in an identifying way.   It’s the same idea as branding cattle back in the cattle rustling days.  There are also WordPress plugins that watermark the image “on the fly”.

Ultimately it is up to you how much effort you want to put into preventing image theft and violation of your copyright, but don’t just ignore the issue, decide on an approach and take action.

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Using Images in Blogs

January 17, 2011 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Thinking Boy One thing I don’t do enough of, is make a practice of using images in my blog. I admit, I’m lazy and don’t want to do the extra work, and there is all that confusing copyright stuff, and where do you find them?

Up to this point the images I had included were screenshots that I had taken to help illustrate a how to post. Since I created the image, I didn’t have to think about finding it or the attribution. But today that is changing, it’s the new year after all and I want to improve my blog.

What you need to know – Copyright issues
Yes, you can find images on the web to use in your blog. You don’t have to source them all yourself. But before you run off to Google Image search and grab the first cool image you come across, educate yourself about the copyright issues.

Public Domain and Creative Commons
For most of you, who just need an image to make your blog post more visually interesting and to get the topic across more quickly, public domain and images published under the creative commons license are the two sources of images you will be dealing with. However keep in mind that there are different licensing rules if you modify the image or use it for commercial reasons. I’m not covering those topics in detail here but read the rules and you should be fine.

Images from the Public Domain are free to use, with no strings attached. They have been contributed to the public for its use. The “thinking boy” image above, is an example of such an image. He is from The Open Clip Art Library and was contributed by Ryan Lerch. This is a great resource for illustrations.

If you use an image published under the Creative Commons License, in most cases you are expected to include an attribution to the creator as well as state that the image is licensed under Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses give artists control on how others may use their work, for example they may or may not grant permission for image modification. A really popular source of images licensed under Creative Commons is Flickr. Flickr Creative Commons Search is a great place to look at photographs to use in your blog.

Free versus Paid Images
For Free images there are a number of resources. Generally you will need to create an account to download them and the images are free to use but often you will need to create an attribution/link back to their site. Sometimes you have to pay for the higher resolution versions. Here are a few sites to check out:

For images that you pay for, you have more freedom to “use them as your own”. While it can get expensive for the higher resolution images, low res images are fine for your blog and are cheap. For example $1-$2 is common at iStockPhoto. These royalty free images are a great solution for websites where an attribution would look out of place.

Want more? This post by PresentationZen has a more extensive list..

Useful Searches Here are a few ways to search for photos other than going to the sites above.

With all these great resources, it opens a new world of possibilities to make my blog posts more visually appealing. Although I’m still working on the “lazy” excuse.

Other fellow bloggers to check out:

  • For some “nuts and bolts” info on working with images in your blog check out this problogger introduction post .
  • Protecting copyrighted images from illegal use is a huge issue on web, especially for artists. A topic for a future post.
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Problem Solved w/ WordPress Redirect Plugin

November 19, 2010 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

I love WordPress. Whenever you run into an issue, most likely someone else has run into it first and solved it for you. The power of crowdsourcing at its best.

Case in point. I was working on a client’s wordpress site. It was an old half configured blog that needed some TLC. Since there wasn’t going to be a lot of pages, I changed the permalink structure to a custom one so I could put keywords into the URLs. I checked whether the site had any backlinks (it didn’t) so I figured I could change the URL structure to it .. no problem. After all, I had set up a sitemap generation plugin so the search engines would be informed of the new URLs, what could go wrong?

Weeks later, I’m noticing that both Bing and Google STILL had the old URLs indexed. Google had indexed all the new ones, but had several of the old ones. And Bing, it hadn’t even found most of the new ones.

Site: Command in Bing

The above excerpt is from typing in site:yourholidayfeast.com into Bing. You can do this with Google as well. This command is a way to see what pages of your site the Search Engines have indexed. It’s a very handy little command.

So obviously these old pages were around to stay for a while. And since these old URLs would get a 404 error, this was not good, a bad experience for the user that might get a bogus result from Google or Bing, and bad for making my client’s site nice and tidy and crawlable for the Search Engines. I needed a way to 301 Redirect these old URLs to the new keyword rich custom permalink URLs.

A 301 Redirect is a way to return a HTTP status code to the requester (whether it be Google or your browser) saying that the URL has permanently changed to a new one. Everyone gets to the new page, any link juice gets passed along and everyone is happy. So I went to “Add New” in the Plugin menu in WordPress and typed in “301 Redirect” in the search … and to my happy surprise I had tons of plugins to choose from.

I picked one called “SS Old URLs” that looked straightforward and close to what I wanted. When I installed it, it wasn’t too clear about how to configure the redirects, but it turns out that (good thing there was a readme) it had added a new menu item in the Settings menu called “Old URLs”. Then it got easy. Using the site: results listing in Bing (and Google) I just typed in the old URL (minus the domain name) and then found the new equivalent and typed that in. Here is what it looks like after I typed in a few:

Adding Redirects with SS Old URLs plugin

Note the nice to have of adding the redirects to your. htaccess file. This involves downloading this file and editing it and uploading (unless you have shell access to your hosting server). Still not too much work so that’s my next step.

Oh, and the client site? It’s a site that helps you plan your holiday events and holiday party meals. If you are one of those hostess types, check it out.

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Four Essential WordPress Plugins

September 12, 2010 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

If you are a blogger with your own hosted WordPress site, consider installing these WordPress plugins:

  • Akismet Run, don’t walk, to install this plugin. In fact in most brand new WordPress installs, you should see this plugin already in your Plugins dashboard, ready to be activated. This plugin does a great job of filtering out spam comments on your blog .. it’s really painful to delete these comments by hand. The one trick, is that you will have to create an account at wordpress.com to obtain your WordPress API Key. However once you have that, you will be able to activate Akismet
  • All-in-One-SEO For more control over your page title and meta tags: see my earlier post on title tags and a pointer to this plugin
  • Google Analytics This doesn’t have to be a plugin as you can update the footer.php code directly with the Google Analytics tracking code, however there are several plugins available. I installed Yoast’s plugin and it was straightforward. With this, you should set up your google analytic account first. If you think you will need help, I would suggest watching the YouTube videos on the topic, just search on “google analytics wordpress plugin video” and browse through them until you find one that makes sense to you. Why do you want to install this plugin? So that you have information about the visitors to your site, what keywords they use … etc. Don’t worry about if you don’t understand google analytics at first. The important thing is to start the analytics tracking now, so you can look at your blog’s performance trends in the future.
  • Google XML Sitemaps This plugin will help Google crawl your blog (and help Google discover it in the first place!). It creates a list of your blog posts and pages in a special format that Google likes (called XML) and updates it when you change or updates your blog. With this plugin, you MAY need to know how to create and change permissions on a file on your server, (usually done through a FTP client such as Filezilla). Another cool thing, which I plan to cover more in a future post, is that it helps with eliminating duplicate content. Instructions and download for Google XML Sitemap Plugin. You may be also able to install it directly from your wordpress config panel (Add New Plugin).

Update: March 4, 2013: These plugins are all still valid. I’ve published a more extensive list of WordPress plugins critical for SEO that you might want to check out as well.

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Firefox and IE and tag conflicts

August 6, 2009 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

I have been doing some customization to the wordpress theme I have using for this blog.  The original theme was too mono-colored and the link color was hard to see.  And of course I wanted my own header.

Many blog themes put the title of your blog both as the page title tag and also as a H1 somewhere as text in your header.  This was fine with me but I wanted to have it display in a smaller font size to be more compatible with my custom header and not overrun my graphic.

So I went into the css of the blog theme and found the id tag (called “h1”) that specified the size in “em” and picked a smaller size.

It looked great on firefox, but on IE7 the size was unchanged.   Furthermore I had also changed the link color from a barely distinguishable grey to a dark red with a command to underline the link on hover.   Again worked great on Firefox 3, totally ignored on IE7.

With some help from my webdesigner friend from talksure, we figured out the problem.   For the blog title, the theme not only enclosed the text in a div tag specifying the id “h1”, but it also had additionally enclosed the text in h1 tags (confusing .. but they *are* different).   Of course the css had a larger size specified for the h1 tag. What was happenning was Firefox gave the div tags priority .. but IE7 gave the regular h1 tags priority.

A similiar problem explained the link color problem.

If you have conflicting tags, the behavior by IE and Firefox is likely to be different.

We think the reason that the title was enclosed in both a div tag and a h1 tag was to give the search engines a recognizable H1.  And it makes sense this would be the blog title.  However for now, the H1’s are removed so that my blog looks the same on all browsers.

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