How to beat the content thiefs

Posted on 27. Mar, 2007 by DeanHunt in Business Advice

As you build more and more sites you will increase the probability that someone will start stealing your content.

One of the main ways of doing this is by taking content directly from your sites feed.

Below is a basic way of stopping the content thiefs.

1. Obtain the IP adrress of the content theif.

%ping www.contentthief.com
PING contentthief.com (94.46.12.184): 56 data bytes

2. Do a search of your logs for that address

%cat www.20061231 | grep “94.46.12.184″
94.46.12.184 – - [31/Dec/2006:01:00:38 -0500] “GET /blog/feed/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 49330 “-” “contenttheif (+http://TrafficBoosterPro.com/)”

3. Add the following to your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^94\.46\.12\.184
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [F]

This will not prevent all content theft, but it is a good start.