How do you legally protect the content of a blog - normal copyright process or something digital?

People have to copy your blog to their computers in order to read it. Further, if they can read it, they can copy it. Put a copyright notice on it and get on with your life.

hee hee

You don’t.

I like how John Gruber does it.

/*
Daring Fireball CSS
Copyright© 2008 John Gruber. All rights reserved.
If you copy without permission, I will mock you.
Layout No. 2 / v1.46
Sat 31 May 2008
*/

( awaits Gruber’s mocking to commence forthwith )

Here is a really cool trick I found a while back, where you trap those who plagiarize your content… Stop Plagiarism in 3 Easy Steps

If you want to steal content it is easy. In PHP..

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument;
@$doc->loadHTMLFile(‘http://www.fluther.com/users/johnpowell/’);
echo $doc->getElementsByTagName(‘title’)>item(0)>textContent;
?>

This is the output. It takes minutes to write a script to grab what you need.

[ Fluther really, really needs a preformatted/code textile markup convention. ]

@robmandu :: Agreed. It is a pain in the ass. I was going to post some javascript earlier and formatting was a pain… I gave up.

Speaking of plagiarism protection by obfuscation… you’ll note that Fluther is not programming code friendly.

In @johnpowell‘s post:
– Fluther auto-replaced straight quote marks with so-called “smart quotes”.
– his redirects to/from “item(0)” were misinterpreted by Fluther as strikethrough which effectively removed the dashes on either side

If you were to try and copy/paste his code directly – that is, plagiarize it – it would not work. Its representation on Fluther is syntactically wrong, even though @johnpowell actually entered it all correctly.

All works are protected by US Copyright law upon publication, including online publication. For further clarification, you can post a Creative Commons license on your site.

It is futile to try to keep your design/content from being copied. It will be possible to be copied, no matter what.

What you should spend much more time worrying about is creating content that is even worth people copying. If you spend all your time trying to protect what you make instead of just making something good, no one is going to care to copy you anyway because your content will be crap.