With the rampant rise of plagiarism, lawsuits, and just the general state of affairs around the blogosphere it seems that sooner rather than later, every blog should put up a Legal Notice / Terms of Use page. A Legal Notice page for your blog is like alarm company stickers on the windows of your house, they doesn’t really do anything other than alert visitors that you mean business. Professional burglars are still going to break in and steal things just as unscrupulous Internet visitors / scrapers continue to repost your content with their ads. At least you are giving the bad guys the heads up that you are serious about your work.

My current legal notice is copied from Elliott Back (by his permission). I changed the name and website in the text of the notice and added my own little blurb about RSS use and the theme that provides the look of this website (sawchuk). Once written the way I liked, I then published Legal Notice as a WordPress page (instead of a regular post).

Now, its all fine and dandy that the Legal Notice had been published, but I wanted it to be visible at the bottom of every page ever published on MaxPower.ca. I wrote a quick plugin to do the job and I thought that maybe others would find it interesting as well. So here is a quick how to / how it works:

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Entrap: To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act.

With the recent release of AntiLeech, an anti splog plugin for WordPress by Owen Winkler, there finally exists a real method of fighting back against content scraping thieves. AntiLeech is a plugin for WordPress that attempts to serve up fake content to known splogs. The plugin identifies splogs by either their User-Agents or IP address (user supplied). From the plugin page:

What does AntiLeech do? AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. No, it does better than that. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them.

AntiLeech also offer up the option of creating custom content to serve up only to splog bots. This option is how I now wildly progistcate on how to entrap would be splogers. By using AntiLeech, a splog will publish on their site a fake piece of content that you or I write. This content can be anything…. » Read the rest of the entry..