Legal Pad: Website Parasites

Six actions to take if someone steals your online content.

A parasite is a unique life form—it depends on something else for its existence. Bloodsucking leeches are good examples; they latch onto a host, feed off of it and basically do nothing in return. Just as nature features a large number of parasites, so does the business world. It’s full of people who can’t come up with original ideas, so they latch onto those who have talent, energy and foresight.

Spa owners, who are some of the most creative people on earth, risk having their efforts stolen. The look and feel of a spa, its unique advertising and any unusual services it provides can all be copied.

This article deals with the theft of a particular type of endeavor—a spa owner’s website. Perhaps you’ve spent a great deal of time in creating your own website or a sizeable amount of money in hiring a professional to do it for you—or maybe both. After expending all of this effort, you learn that someone plagiarizes its contents or—in some cases—steals the whole thing.

How does this happen, and what can you do about it?

Navigating Around

How is the content on one of your webpages or even the entire site up for grabs? It’s a much easier process than you might think it is. Websites are merely software code written to display within a web browser, such as Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer (IE).

Let’s do a little test: If you go to the upper left corner of your web browser, you’ll see the menus File, Edit and then View. Click on View and move your mouse down to the entry titled “Page Source” (if you’re using Firefox) or “Source” (for IE). Select it, and up pops a window containing a lot of coding. This is what makes a webpage look the way it does. You can copy and paste this coding into web-creation programs and—voilà—you’ve stolen a webpage.

It’s easy, but copying all of the code on a site can be a time-consuming process. To speed it up, some software developers have created programs that automate it, such as WebReaper. Just like anything else, it can be used for good or evil, depending on the character of the person behind the keyboard. The act of downloading entire websites is called web scraping.

While this process is fairly simple, you’re better off protecting yourself from the get-go. Follow these steps to ensure your website’s safety:

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