Do not steal my content

Probably more than once by accident discovered that someone copies your content without your permission of your website. How to prevent this and how to protect yourself through this type of action I’ll try to explain in this article.

Do not steal my content

There are many types of theft:

  • copying content,
  • copying images or/and template,
  • displaying your website (all or part of) under a different domain (after using iframe).

Also, you have many ways to secure your website. You can use special scripts or convenient to use extensions for Joomla!. Of course, there is no 100% protection method, but any hindrance lowers the number of potential borrowings. Let’s start with protection against iframe. The iframe tag is an HTML tag used to embed content from another website. Like most useful things, iframes can be used for good or for bad things. Prepare a simple html file (eg. lesson.html) that you want to show them on the website of the thief, and then to. Htaccess file paste the following code:

     ErrorDocument 403 /lesson.html
     SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://domain/" noaccess=1 
     SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://domain&" noaccess=1 
     SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.domain/" noaccess=1 
     SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.domain$" noaccess=1
     <filesmatch gif="" png="" jpe="" g="" php="" html=""> Order Allow,Deny 
     Deny from env=noaccess </filesmatch>

Now, remember that in the “Domain” enter the address of their host.

Note, file called .htaccess in your Apache site root (main) directory. The period before the name means the file is hidden, so you may want to edit your file as htaccess.txt, upload it to your server, then rename the txt file to .htaccess in your directory.

Hotlink Protection with .htaccess

Bandwidth theft or “hotlinking” is direct linking to a web site’s files (images, video, etc.). Hotlink protection can save you lots of bandwidth by preventing other sites from displaying images from yur website. To stop hotlinking of your images and display a replacement image called nohotlink.jpg from other server, place this code in your .htaccess file:

       RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yourdomain.com\.com/ [NC] 
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ 
     RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://othersite.com/nohotlink.jpg [L]  

Hotlinked images can only be replaced by other images, not with an HTML page.

You can use generator from htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/to create a .htaccess file for hotlink protection of your images and pictures.

Joomla Content Protection

You will find useful extensions on JED in Access & Security > Content Restriction category. Using some of them you’ll be able to:

  • Disable right mouse click;
  • Disable text selection;
  • Disable copy/paste;
  • Define which user types are affected by the protect plugin.

For some project I use to install JoomSimple Content Protection (joomsimple.com) which is very easy to configure. By now only the AntiCopy are compatybility with Joomla 1.5 & Joomla 1.6.

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This article was first published July 19th, 2011