What this section covers

Copyright monitoring refers to tracking how your published content is used, cited, and potentially infringed across the web. This guide covers practical, low-cost approaches suitable for individual content creators and small documentation projects.

Why monitor copyright

For technical documentation and personal content:

  • Detect scraping: Identify automated copying of documentation
  • Track citations: See who's referencing your work
  • Prevent hotlinking: Stop bandwidth theft from direct image links
  • Maintain attribution: Ensure proper credit when content is reused

Monitoring approaches

Manual search monitoring

Basic but effective:

  • Regular Google searches for unique phrases from your content
  • Image reverse search (Google Images, TinEye)
  • Checking Archive.org snapshots of your site
  • Monitoring referring URLs in server logs

Automated tools

Free/low-cost options:

  • Google Alerts: Email notifications for specific phrases
  • Copyscape (free tier): Duplicate content detection
  • Server logs: Analyzing referrer headers and bandwidth patterns
  • Search Console: Google's data on how your site appears in search

Technical protection

Server-level measures:

  • Referrer checking: Block hotlinking via .htaccess or _headers
  • robots.txt: Declare crawling preferences (advisory only)
  • Rate limiting: Slow down aggressive scrapers
  • Watermarking: Add attribution to images/diagrams

Key monitoring indicators

Hotlink detection

Watch for:

  • Unusual bandwidth spikes
  • Referrers from unrelated domains
  • High traffic to image/media URLs without corresponding page views

Content scraping signs

  • Entire page structures copied
  • Your CSS/images referenced from other domains
  • Automated user agents in logs (check for non-standard crawlers)
  • Sudden appearance of your content on low-quality sites

Response strategies

For minor unauthorized use

  1. Assess harm: Is it actually harmful or just citation?
  2. Contact directly: Polite email requesting attribution
  3. DMCA notice: Formal takedown request if needed
  4. Technical blocking: Referrer blocks, IP bans as last resort

For systematic scraping

  • Implement rate limiting
  • Serve reduced-quality versions to suspected scrapers
  • Consider legal consultation if commercial harm occurs

Key pages in this section

Related sections

Technical glossary

Hotlinking : Direct linking to images/media on your server from other websites, consuming your bandwidth

Scraping : Automated extraction of content from websites, often for republication

DMCA : Digital Millennium Copyright Act — US law providing takedown process for copyright infringement

Referrer header : HTTP header showing which page linked to the current request

Rate limiting : Restricting number of requests from a single source within a time period