But while the approach to integration is new, the big idea behind the service is still very much the same. iCopyright Article Tools + Syndication places various badges on your site that invites people to license content through it.

You, through your Conductor control panel can set the services offered, the prices charged for those services and even set many of them to be free.

But is it something you should add to your site? The answer truly depends on what you’re looking for in your syndication tools.

What is iCopyright Article Tools Plugin?

To be clear, iCopyright Article Tools is not intended as a replacement for other sharing services, such as those that encourage posting to Facebook, Twitter, etc. Not only does iCopyright not provide those services, but they published a report in 2009 that said such tools may increase infringement.

Instead, iCopyright’s tools are aimed exclusively, or almost exclusively, at those who want to encourage paid licensing of their content.

To do this, the plugin first has you sign up for an iCopyright Conductor account, which will require you to fill out a very long form with a great deal of information about you, your site and your work. Once you’ve done that and gotten your publication ID, you should be able to sign in and start adding the plugin’s toolbars to your site.

On that front, iCopyright’s plugin has two different toolbars you can add to your post, either a horizontal or vertical toolbar. Here’s the horizontal one:

[icopyright horizontal toolbar]

The service also adds and interactive copyright notice, such as this one:

[interactive copyright notice]

(Note: All of these toolbars are functioning so you can play with them, however, bear in mind that this article, as with the rest of this site, is licensed under a Creative Commons License and NOT under these terms.)

Clicking on the toolbar will open up a popup window that lets you license the content in a variety of ways including sending via email, printouts (including both by you and created by iCopyright), reposting on other sites, and other publication services.

In each case, iCopyright handles the calculation of the price (if any), the transaction and the generation of the license for the creator. In exchange, iCopyright takes a cut of the revenue earned from the transaction, an amount that varies based on what rights are being secured.

The end result, theoretically, is that users who want to license can do so easily through iCopyright, which in turn makes the process as simple as possible for the buyer an makes it hands-free for you as the creator.

But as great as that sounds, it doesn’t mean that iCopyright Article Tools plugin is right for you or for your site.

Are iCopyright’s Article Tools Right For You?

The beautiful thing about iCopyright’s Article Tools is that they enable any content creator, big or small, to get involved in licensing their content. Most such clearance agencies either only or primarily represent larger copyright holders, such as newspapers, magazines, etc. and don’t do much for smaller players like bloggers.

iCopyright not only lets such creators get into the game, but also gives them very granular control over prices. You can determine how much you want to charge for virtually every way you can license your work, including setting tiered pricing, as well as disabling/enabling various licensing systems.

That being said, that granular control comes at a price. Though installing the plugin is simple, setting it up, including signing up for your account and setting your pricing is going to take a significant amount of time and it comes with a pretty steep learning curve too.

The process, unfortunately, isn’t too much better if you already have a “Creators” account with iCopyright as you will have to have iCopyright convert your account over for it to work properly.

What this means is that iCopyright only practical for those who are serious about turning content licensing into a revenue source and not for people who just want to make it easy to let others email their articles (there are many other plugins/services for that).

It’s also worth noting that the plugin and its toolbars are a bit rough around some of the edges. In testing the plugin, I ran into a series of bugs, mostly revolving around the use of my old Creators account.

Fortunately, most of those bugs were resolved in the 1.3 update (though old accounts still need to be converted). There are also minor issues such as my theme not liking the plugin, causing it to display the toolbars on the front page as well as the single posts.

Most importantly though, I don’t think many bloggers are going to see any revenue from licensing their content in this manner. There simply doesn’t seem to be enough interest in this kind of paid licensing of blogger and smaller creator content as most of the sharing of such content is done via social networking and via tools that don’t require a license at all.

Even though iCopyright has licensed nearly 3 million articles this year, most of that is, almost certainly, from the company’s larger partners.

That being said, iCopyright may find an audience with mid-sized publishers with these tools. Sites that perhaps are too small to be considered a “big fish” but still large enough and in a good niche to see at least some licensing.

Bottom Line

Someone who is casually interested in licensing probably will find these tools to be overwhelming in terms of complexity and underwhelming in terms of rewards. The true niche for this product is slightly upfield, with mid-sized publishers who can expect to earn some revenue, but not enough to warrant creating an in-house licensing system.

But even with that there are still some rough edges that need to be polished and definitely some room to improve the simplicity of the entire process on the creator side (as opposed to the purchaser side, which is very straightforward).

It’s also worth noting that iCopyright Article Tools are incompatible with Creative Commons Licenses, unless you use the tools to sell commercial rights not granted in the CC license.

In the end, if you’re in the niche that’s best served by these tools, you should definitely give them a try. But if you’re not, you’ll probably want to take a pass and find other ways to benefit from sharing, such as focusing more on social media.

Disclosure: I have done paid consulting for iCopyright in the past.

That being said, watermarking your images can be a tremendous pain, especially if you have a large volume of images or are constantly creating new ones. The best solution to this has been to integrate watermarking into your workflow and photographers have been doing that for years with Photoshop and other editing programs. Likewise, several photo sharing sites have also integrated watermarking into their services, including deviantART, making it virtually hands free.

But what about bloggers? To that end sverde1 has created a WordPress entitled “Watermaks Reloaded” that aims to add watermarking to your blogging workflow. But how well does it work and is it worth the energy? I decided to install it and find out.

Testing Watermark Reloaded

The basics of Watermark Reloaded is fairly simple. Once you install the plugin, which can be easily installed via the WordPress backend since it is in the official directory, you simply configure the options for the plugin and go.

Among the options you can set which image sizes get the watermark, where it appears on the image (including the margin) and the text/formatting of the watermark.

All in all, it takes a few seconds to set up and run but, once your options are configured, all the images up upload to your blog automatically have your watermark attached to it.

To that end, you can see a sample of a watermarked image above as all the images that I’ve embedded in this post used the plugin.

But while there is no doubt that the plugin is easy to install and set up, the question is whether its worthwhile and that one is a bit more difficult to answer.

Is Watermark Reloaded Worthwhile?

To be clear, Watermark Reloaded does everything it says it will do, but the options are minimalist and the plugin may not be right for many WordPress users.

For one, there’s no way to turn the plugin off on specific images (something that’s on the “to do list” for the plugin). This means if your site uses a mix of original and stock images, you probably want to pass as you don’t want to watermark images you don’t own.

Second, the plugin doesn’t do any “sanity checking” to make sure that the watermark will fit on the image, producing watermarks like the one to the right, where the mark is too big for the image (also on the “to do list”).

Finally, the watermark itself is fairly inflexible. Users only get to choose the text, the font, the size and the color of the mark. There is no ability to use a logo, set a transparency or set up the watermark to change based on the image (IE: White watermark on black background and vice versa)

Still, if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to do a simple watermark on all of your WordPress images, this may be the WordPress plugin for you.

Bottom Line

Personally, I’ll be uninstalling this plugin once this review is done. While it hasn’t caused any problems I don’t have any use for watermarking every image on PT, especially since so many are stock images.

That being said, there are some photobloggers and artists out there that might find this plugin very useful and, for those, I definitely want to recommend it. Just bear in mind that it is much more limited than other watermarking tools, though it will save time and help guarantee nothing goes online without a mark.

However, I have to wonder if it makes more sense to integrate watermarking into the blogging workflow or the photography workflow. I would think for most it should be the latter but for some, this approach may well make sense.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Eminem Sues Audi Over Ad’s Use of “Lose Yourself”

First off today, rapper Eminem, through his publisher Eight Mile Style, has filed a cease-and-desist order in Germany against the auto manufacturer Audi, who used his song “Lose Yourself” in a recent commercial. The song was famously in a commercial for Chrysler here in the U.S., in an ad the debuted during the Super Bowl. The publisher has said that they will seek damages in this case. Further filings in this matter are expected.

2: Music and Film Industries Split Over Pirates

Next up today, in Australia the music industry has reversed a previous position calling for suspected pirates to be disconnected from the Web and has instead called for other measures to be taken that don’t include it. The music industry, though its local trade organization MIPI, has broken ranks from the film industry and its trade group, AFACT, which endorses such measures. The move comes after a UN report called the disconnecting of suspected file sharers a violation of human rights and said that laws in other nations would either have to be stricken or amended.

3: Joost de Valk Accuses WPMU DEV of Copyright Infringement, Sends Cease and Desist

Finally today, WordPress developer Joost de Valk has filed a cease and desist letter with James Farmer, the owner of WPMU.org, a WordPress development company, claiming that their WPMU DEV SEO WordPress plugin “copied large chunks of code” from his WordPress SEO plugin. According to the notice, and his blog post on the topic, de Valk does not take issue with the copying itself since his plugin is released under the GPL, but rather the stripping of his copyright headers. MPMU.org responded briefly calling it a “mistake” but after the reply caused controversy of its own the response was pulled down.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Reese lays out many factors for this success, including that WordPress was built using PHP and Movable Type using PERL, which proved much more difficult for users to set up, better sales efforts by WordPress’ team and mistakes by Six Apart, the company that developed Movable Type, that accidentally poisoned the community.

However, Reese also points to another issue that, he feels, played a major role in WordPress, along with Automattic, gaining an upper hand: Licensing.

Specifically, Reese singles out the open source nature of WordPress and a licensing debacle in 2004 that confused many Movable Type users and turned them into WordPress users, most never to come back.

Indeed, the Movable Type/WordPress competition is a textbook example of why licensing matters and how good, clear licensing can strengthen your case where poor licensing can sink it.

For evidence of this, one just has to look at my history with the two applications.

My Story

Prior to 2005. I was a Movable Type user, having converted from Graymatter as it began to be abandoned. I loved Movable Type and, though I found the install to be tricky, once it was up and running it was great. A powerful tool that I expanded my use of, starting out with just one category of my site and then using it for every section.

Then, in 2004, the licensing debacle hit. Six Apart tried to create two versions or two licenses of Movable Type, a free one for amateur bloggers with limited needs and paid version that allowed for more blogs and more authors.

However, a lot of questions were raised by this. How did Six Apart define a blog? What is commercial use by their standards? And so forth. Though I was already very active in copyright (this was over a year before the launch of Plagiarism Today), I didn’t have a lot of the answers I needed.

It became clear that Movable Type was not a solid foundation for me moving forward. I didn’t abandon it immediately, but started dabbling with other systems, most notably WordPress, which were truly open source.

And WordPress was what I fell in love with. I loved the ease of installation, the reliability of use and how it seemed to naturally fit my particular needs. So, when I did decide to launch Plagiarism Today in 2005, I chose WordPress as the platform and it’s been the platform of choice for every site I’ve developed since – save one shopping cart site.

I tried WordPress for the licensing but stayed for all the other reasons Reese listed and, even though Melody is open source completely, I don’t think I’m likely to look back.

Why Licensing Matters

When you set up a copyright license you are essentially creating the rules for use. Whether it’s the content on your blog, an application you’re distributing or a song you’ve written, the license tells people what they can and can’t do with it.

The problem is that, if the terms of the license are confusing or if they are constantly changing, the people that try to follow the terms are going to be frustrated, worried and unsure. That makes people not want to use your work, even in the manners you intended.

The Movable Type vs. WordPress “war” wasn’t about “free” triumphing over “paid”. As Reese points out, Movable Type was just as “free” for nearly all users as WordPress is. Instead, it was a triumph of clear, easily understood licensing over ambiguous, changing terms.

This is why services like Creative Commons are so important. They lay out licensing terms in clear, easily understood language that gives people a sense of security and comfort in using the license.

More importantly though, this is why every content creator needs to think about the licensing terms and, most critically, how to avoid confusion and uncertainty.

The most important things with a license is that it be clear, consistent and fair. In 2004, Six Apart messed up the first two components (and some would argue all three) and it cost them dearly.

Bottom Line

Was licensing the only thing that helped put WordPress over the top? Definitely not. WordPress still had and has many advantages over Movable Type. But without that stampede of users in 2004, it most likely would have taken WordPress a lot longer to be come the top CMS and we would have a much more competitive ecosystem today.

Automattic’s dedication to the GPL is legendary, even going to bat against theme developers over it, this gives a lot of comfort to those who use it on their sites, comfort that it will be free, maintained and remain modifiable if needed.

Most people simply don’t have that level of confidence in Movable Type and Six Apart, especially after their recent buyout and that makes a lot of difference when trying to convince people to build their entire online presence with your product at its core.

Blogs, however, don’t use APA and MLA styles. Though both are effective and useful for citing a variety of sources, they are not short, easy to use or quick. Basically, they just aren’t practical in a blogging environment.

Still, there are some blogs that do have academic aims, such as blogs for scientific organizations, those at universities and so forth. These blogs may want to use MLA or APA style for at least some of their citations to keep up with the standards of the industry they are in. However, doing so can be tricky, not only are blogs not natural places for such citations, but the time and energy required to create them may be too much in many cases.

Fortunately, if you are interested in using MLA and/or APA citations on your blog, there are easy ways to do so, if you’re willing to look.

Adding Citations to Your Site (Cites on Your Site)

When it comes to using academic citations on your blog, WordPress users will likely find the best relief in the plugin directory. There, at least two plugins offer this functionality and make it easy to add formal citations to any blog post or page.

The first is Netblog, which works by adding references to an individual post or page. The references can be displayed in a traditional bibliography, complete with strict formatting, a footnote system, in a more user-friendly “further reading” list or in a combination thereof. In short, it’s a powerful citation and reference system that can do virtually anything a blogger might need.

Papercite is the other, which interprets BibTeX files and automatically formats them into HTML. Though it’s clearly ideal for those who already are familiar with and have BibTex content, Papercite also supports external files, such as citeulike and BibSonomy, which can be easily used to generate BibTeX files. It’s a more complicated system than Netblog, but may be easier for those already working with BibTeX content.

Outside of plugins, there are a variety of services that make generating bibliograophies and citations easy, including EasyBib and KnightCite. However, the export methods of these tools usually favor word processors, not blogs, and will likely require some reformatting before hitting publish.

Still, there’s no reason that a blog can’t have a full bibliography, the only thing standing in the way is the time required, even with these tools.

Making Your Blog Easier to Cite (Cites of Your Site)

If instead of (or in addition to) adding full citations to your site, you want to make it easier for others to cite your work in their papers, it is a fairly easy trick that just about any blogger can do. In fact, Science Daily has a great example of such a citation system underneath their posts.

The one on Science Daily appears to be a custom creation but there are other services on the Web. Easybib, for example, has a simple widget that you can drop into your site anywhere. The script can be easily added to a template and customized with PHP to be relevant for every page.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a test of this script to work on this page for a sample, but I will update if I am able to get it working.

However, no system I could find is anything near what I could consider perfect and there’s definitely room in this area for WordPress plugins or other tools to help make citation easier, ideally including APA, MLA and other key citation styles, both formal and informal.

Unfortunately, though a handful of plugins might have offered this feature in the past, it seems none have been updated for the more recent version of WordPress.

Bottom Line

Do most blogs need to mess with MLA or APA style citations? Probably not. In the majority of cases a simple link will more than suffice for citation.

But for blogs who do need such citations or wish to offer it to others, there are solutions out there that can help. Unfortunately, there is still clearly a long way to go here and I’m hoping that some developers out there might be willing to offer a helping hand.

Fundamentally, what the plugin does is create a form that you can insert into any page or post of your site to openly solicit submissions. Though the form is a bit small for actually writing in, it can be easily copied and pasted into.

The form is highly customizable, allowing you to change the submit button, show a CAPTCHA and also set a min/max number of words. You can also charge visitors for submitting content to your site, a method often used to stop spammers.

However, the reason it gets a mention on Plagiarism Today is that the plugin integrates with Copyscape to automatically detect if the work has been plagiarized or if it has simply been submitted elsewhere first.

You will, however, need a premium Copyscape account, which will cost at least $5 for 100 queries and. Also, if you use this option, all incoming submissions will be checked, meaning they cost you 5 cents apiece. Still, for someone who is interested in streamlining the entire content submission/copy detection system, it’s a pretty neat idea.

Unfortunately, the plugin is not available in the WordPress Plugin Library and is only available as a download from the link above. Since I wasn’t able to verify that the code was adequately secure, especially since it accepts user submissions, I was not comfortable installing it.

That being said, this idea of integrating Copyscape into submission plugins, such as the Content Submit plugin, is an interesting one and something I’d like to see more of.

All in all, those who have a use for the plugin and are more comfortable installing non-reviewed plugins may want to give it a try. It could be a great way to streamline the entire content submission process, including the ability to verify authenticity.

Note: I will be discussing this further with Patrick O’Keefe on the Copyright 2.0 Show. You can listen to the live recording here at 6:30 PM ET Wednesday and catch the recorded version on this site Friday.

If you missed the dust up over WordPress, Thesis and the GPL last week, you were probably offline completely.

To make a long story short, WordPress, the popular blogging platform, is released under the GPL, an open source license that requires all derivative works to be licensed under the same terms.

However, Chris Pearson created a theme framework for WordPress called Thesis that he sells but does not license under the GPL. Many in the WordPress community, including Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg,says that this is a violation of the license themes are derivative works of WordPress. Pearson disagrees and the tiff ended with the two threatening to take matters into court.

The recent war of words took place on an audio call on Mixergy and was followed by a Twitter debate between the two. Now the entire WordPress community is debating the issue and, try as I might to stay out of it, I am constantly being barraged with questions.

So, very briefly, I want to talk about these issues and offer my rather scant thoughts on them. I don’t expect to bring any clarity to the issue (one of the reasons I’ve avoided it) but perhaps offer something nonetheless.

Seeing Both Sides

I won’t bother restating both sides of the argument. Mark Jaquith does a great job restating the WordPress/Automattic viewpoint and lawyer Michael Alex Wasylik covers the opposing view on his site. Furthermore, there may be a fair use issue involved in the creation of premium themes and a special code-copying problem for Thesis specifically to further muddy the waters.

What is clear is that the issue as to whether or not Thesis, or any WordPress theme for that matter, should be licensed under the GPL, upon distribution, is becoming much more complex. In 2009, I wrote about this topic for the Blog Herald and largely sided with the Software Freedom Law Center, which said that WordPress Themes are GPL protected but CSS files and images are not as they are separate from WordPress completely.

However, I am less certain about that today than I was a year ago (almost to the day). The reason isn’t because I feel the SFLC’s analysis was flawed but that there are many different potentially valid viewpoints on the issue, without a court weighing in, it is virtually impossible to predict the ruling one would see in such a case.

In short, you’re dealing with a derivative works issue, a notoriously muddy area of copyright to begin with, throwing in relatively new technology that is untested in the courts and raising in fair use arguments to create a near-perfect storm of copyright confusion.

Simply put, if Matt does go forward with his threat to sue Pearson over this issue, I do not envy any judge this case winds up in front of.

Why No One Wins

While there is a very legitimate legal issue at hand here, as Ryan Hellyer from WPTavern put it succinctly, “whether direct function calls are considered to cause a violation of the GPL license or not,” it seems that the battle lines are drawn less on legal grounds and more on philosophical ones.

This isn’t a surprise, open source and the GPL in particular are deeply philosophical things for many, part of a view on technology and even life that goes beyond software. It is widely seen that what Pearson is doing is an attack on that philosophy as much as it is an an attempt to exploit WordPress for his own gain. Pearson and his supporters view the actions of Mullenweg and his supporters as an attempt to tell him what he can do with his own code and how to run his business.

But while these philosophical issues are important, they are causing a tremendous divide in the WordPress community, especially among those who develop for it. Resources, time and energy are being spent on this debate and, if it continues, it will inevitably result in some talented developers leaving the community.

In short, this war is like all other wars in that, no matter who “wins” there are no “winners”. It may be necessary and, at this point, probably is but war rarely makes ill feelings go away and only causes the living to mourn the casualties.

Unless things die down and blow over, the WordPress community will never be the same and, unfortunately, not changed in good ways. However, we’re likely past that point already and, if this case does go to court, it will certainly be beyond the tipping point.

This makes me sad to say, but it is the truth.

Bottom Line

If one were to corner me and demand that I choose sides, which I know someone probably will, I would say I still feel the SFLC analysis is the best available. That being said, there is a great deal of legitimate uncertainty as to whether or not the calling functions constitutes a derivative work and a strong potential fair use argument that casts a shadow over that analysis.

In short, my most honest answer is “I don’t know” and I don’t believe anyone does. We’re all guessing here and legal minds I respect highly have come down on both sides of the issue. Until the courts have ruled (emphasis on “courts” as there will be appeals of any ruling) we really won’t know.

In the meantime, I think it is more important that this issue not rip apart the community and, instead, resolve this as amicably as possible while still working together toward common goals.

It may seem to be impossible, but I think it can be done and it has to be done.

The “average” article on Plagiarism Today is between 800 and 1,200 words. While they are certainly longer articles for blogs, they have nothing on the license agreements for many of the most popular services.

YouTube’s Terms of Service has a whopping 4,076 words. Facebook’s has 3,839. Even WordPress.com’s has some 2,924 words, though that includes the “gist” section that summarizes the terms.

Reading through these license agreements can be a major pain, especially considering that they are written almost exclusively in legalese and much of the content is just stock. Separating what is important and unique from what is in every agreement can be very difficult, even for attorneys.

However, an application called EULAlyzer claims it can help. Though it is aimed more at helping you make sense of the license agreements you have to sign when installing software, it can work on any license agreement by drawing your attention to areas that you may want to read more closely.

But does it work? I decided to put it to the test.

How it Works

The idea of EULAlyzer is that you take the agreement, copy it into the program and let it scan it for words that it considers interesting. You can then jump to the relevant passages in the agreement and read them more closely, without worrying about the less interesting parts.

This can, supposedly, save you time when trying to look through a license agreement, or any agreement for that matter, and better understand the most important elements.

All in all, the app is pretty straight-forward though the app does have a pro version for $19.95 that automatically scans EULA’s of any software you install, similar to an antivirus but for license agreements and one that only warns you of issues, leaving the final decision up to you.

All in all though, EULAlyzer doesn’t do anything that you can’t do with the find feature on your computer, but it has knowledge of what to look for built in and that, in turn, can be very helpful, especially to a layperson, when deciding what to look closer at.

However, for the purpose of this test, we’re taking EULAlyzer out of its element, software licenses, and instead looking at it the terms of use for various Web sites, namely YouTube, Facebook and WordPress.com.

The Tests

The first test I did with EULAlyzer looked at the terms of use for YouTube. EULAlyzer found four keywords of interesting including “Advertising”, “Third Party”, “Web Site Address” and “Without Notice”.

The advertising warnings were fairly mundane, all being mentions of YouTube’s well-known advertising program. The third party warnings were more interesting, alerting to how YouTube is protecting itself from the action of third parties and linking to them, but once again not interesting. The website address links were more dull, just linking to other TOS-related pages but the without notice links were extremely useful as it alerted me to changes that can be made without disclosure to me, including changes to the terms themselves.

While this was helpful, there was no mention of licensing or YouTube’s rights over content uploaded at all. Needless to say, this isn’t an issue routinely encountered with software but is a major deal with Web services.

My test with Facebook met with similar results. It identified three worrisome keywords, “Advertising”, “Promotional Messages” and “Third Party” though all three were fairly mundane, though the “Advertising” section did draw attention to Facebook’s privacy settings, an issue they have struggled with. Once again though, no mention of licensing or how your content will be used nor any word on termination of the agreement.

Finally, WordPress.com produces the same keyword matches as YouTube but with significantly fewer results under each match and none of them particularly worrisome. Once again though, no mention of licensing your content or termination of the agreemeent.

The Results

Though I found EULAlyzer helpful with YouTube and Facebook, it didn’t cover all of the bases. This is due to the fact that it is geared toward analyzing software license agreements, not website agreements, and the different needs they have. Still, it was able to highlight some of the better-known controversies involving both YouTube and Facebook’s policies and anyone using the software correctly would have known about the issues.

That being said though, relying on this application to analyze EULAs for web services would be a huge mistake. You’d have to do additional searches for keywords such as “licensing”, “copyright” and “termination” to make sure that you had the complete picture. However, if you know the keywords to look for, you can just use the find feature in your browser to do the search by hand. The only difference is that EULAlyzer also does a decent job ranking the concerns, highlighting areas where you should pay more attention.

So, even though it was incomplete, it was still somewhat helpful. However, there isn’t a lot of reason to use it consistently with Web EULAs at this time. Instead, it should probably stick to its native territory, software agreements.

That being said, I don’t see why it couldn’t be modified, perhaps with a tweaked version, for this purpose. The idea is still very much alive.

Bottom Line

I can’t encourage the use of this for the kinds of license agreements most content creators are worried about, still, for software EULAs it can be a great tool and, with some tweaking, it could be very useful for this purpose too.

All in all, this app is a great idea and, considering that its free, I think it should be on every legally-conscious user’s machine, if nothing else than dealing with those pesky software EULAs.

So, while you shouldn’t rely on it exclusively for any license agreement, especially a Web service one, you should definitely give it a shot as it can help highlight areas of concern and let you make better-informed decisions.

I’m a big fan of WordPress and one of the key reasons has been the plugins. There’s a great community of WordPress developers out there that create very powerful plugins that do everything from make your site run faster to keeping the comment spammers at bay.

However, one area that has been a bit of a disappointment has been when it comes to tracking and content protection. Though Copyfeed was a veritable Swiss army knife for RSS tracking and protection, it hasn’t been updated in over a year and doesn’t work with current versions.

Likewise, the Digital Fingerprint plugin has fallen on hard times as well.

WordPress plugins are in a great position to help bloggers track and protect their content. Not only do they have direct access to the server and its files, including the feed, but they operate largely in the administration area, where most WordPress users go for all of their blogging information.

With that in mind, here are four WordPress plugins I have not been able to find but would like to see created. If there are any developers looking for a weekend project, maybe they’ll consider one. Likewise, if I’ve overlooked a plugin, please let me know so I can update this post.

4. Proper Licensing

There seems to be about a thousand WordPress plugins that let you add a Creative Commons License to your site. This seems odd to me as it is pretty trivial to just add the CC license yourself via your themes editor, but if you prefer to use a plugin, that is perfectly fine.

However, there seems to be no plugins that help people license the content correctly, including completing the license. PhotoDropper is an excellent example of correctly licensing content as it goes into the blog, but I want something to help others as they license the content from my site.

Specifically, I’d like a “reuse this article” link to appear on my site and provide the visitor with HTML code that they can use to paste the work into their site. That will include proper attribution and, if appropriate, a link to the CC license. Ideally, I’d like to have this plugin remove images (or at least the option to) so to avoid hotlinking issues.

This could be used with CC licenses, which would be ideal, but could also be used for those who want specific “author boxes” on their reused articles. Either way, the end result would be that, with a click, a copy and a paste, a visitor would be able to republish my articles and complete my license terms.

Note: There is already a plugin for licensing RSS feeds called SourcedFrom that I will be talking about more next week.

3. Non-Repudiation Integration

One of the more difficult problems on the Web is knowing who published something first. Though not likely useful in a court of law, it can be VERY useful in the court of public opinion. To help with that, non-repudiation services such MyFreeCopyright, Numly and Registered Commons have formed to record when a post is saved.

It would be nice if the process of submitting to these services would be automatic so that, when I hit “Publish” the work is automatically uploaded, timestamped and stored. Technically both Numly and Registered Commons have WordPress plugins but both are out of date and Registered Commons was too difficult to ever be practical.

However, the limitation here is likely due to the lack of robust APIs. MyFreeCopyright and SafeCreative, the two leading free services, both lack publicly available APIs at this time (though both say they are working on it).

This may be a situation where someone has to create the service first and the plugin second…

2. FairShare Integration

FairShare is a free service by Attributor that follows your feed and produces a second feed for you to subscribe to that locates copies of your works on the Web. It works very well for bloggers and uses the same matching technology as the main Attributor service, which is used by many major publishers.

Integrating this into WordPress makes a lot of sense. A simple version might just subscribe to the FairShare feed in the admin panel where more advanced ones could look at the content of the entries and prioritize them in some way.

This might be tricky as the FairShare feed is just a regular RSS feed with the content laid out in a table. Also, the feed structure could change at any time as changes are made to the service. Still, given how frequent content reuse is and how much of the potential audience is on other sites, it seems like it could be a worthwhile addition.

1. CopyFeed Replacement

CopyFeed, when it worked, was a powerhouse against RSS feed scraping let you track where your feed was being used and then block the spammers from accessing it. No need to send cease and desist letters or takedown notices unless you wanted the old content removed or the spammer constantly worked to circumvent your blocks.

It required careful use, especially since you could block legitimate visitors as well, but it was a powerful plugin that was great for those who did not use FeedBurner. However, it doesn’t appear to work with current WordPress versions and seems to be dead in its development

That being said, the plugin is GPL, so there may be an opportunity for another developer to revive and fix it.

Bottom Line

Though I don’t expect all or even any of the plugins above to materialize, I hope that by tossing these ideas out a conversation will start about the role such plugins could play in licensing, tracking and protecting content. Maybe then one of these ideas, or an offshoot of them, will catch the eye of a developer who will take it up.

Even just one of these plugins could be a huge asset for bloggers. I’m hoping that someone else will see that and consider at least one to be a worthwhile venture…

WordPress users have long had plugins to extend their blogging platform in countless ways. And on Plagiarism Today we’ve talked about many plugins that work to protect your content including the Digital Fingerprint plugin and Copyfeed.

However, where most plugins have worked to protect your feed, a plugin by Chetan Gole entitled WP-CopyProtect wants to help you protect your content from those that would misuse it by visiting your site directly.

But while the plugin is very simple and easy to use, by the author’s own admission, it doesn’t do a great deal to stop content misuse and, in my opinion, is most likely a step backwards for most bloggers.

How it Works

WP-CopyProtect has two basic functions. The first is disabling right click on your site and the second is preventing text selection. To do this, it uses well-established (and widely hated) JavaScripts that the plugin will place into your site’s footer at the click of the mouse.

When you first install WP-CopyProtect, and visit the settings page, you’re given a screen with the option to enable or disable both right click text selection on your site. You can also select a specific warning that users will see when they try to right click on your site.

Once activated, the scripts do seem to work well enough as they are based upon well-established techniques. Though they can be defeated any number of ways, they do function as advertised.

However, if you enable the anti-text selection feature, the plugin adds a footer to your entire site that promotes the plugin. It seems to disappear if you turn off that particular feature, but there is no warning in the plugin itself that it does this and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to either edit this footer, disable it or even style it.

Needless to say, I found this very annoying and frustrating. Especially since it provides links back to the original site that appear to be search-engine friendly, meaning that it could be viewed by Google as a form of spamming and hurt the blog’s PageRank.

This is extremely dangerous and, in my view, poor form to do so without warning or a means to remove it.

My Take

Using DRM on your site is a bad idea, period. These scripts will do little, if anything, to protect your content and will do a great deal to frustrate those who use your site legitimately.

Many, myself included, do a lot of navigation using the right click menu and there are many legitimate reasons to want to select text on a site. For every infringer that is hindered or thwarted, dozens of legitimate users will be hurt far worse.

The footer issue is also very troublesome to me. Though I am fine with plugin authors getting credit for their work, I may consider adding a page that lists the active plugins used on this site, adding a footer link without permission or any means of removal is poor form, especially considering how harmful it could be to users.

Despite all of this, I have to give Gole high marks for his honesty about his plugins limitations. He has the following statement both on the plugin’s page in the admin panel and a similar one on his own site.

This is just a basic copy protect plug-in, if someone want to copy your content he/she can go to source of the blog and can easily copy the stuff from there. Most copy cats use your blogs RSS feeds to steal the content. Always select “Summary” at “For each article in a feed, show” in WordPress admin panel “Reading Settings” so that even if someone try to copy your content from feeds he/she can not copy the whole post.

Gole also admits that he doesn’t use the plugin on his own site because he uses a CC license, which permits copying.

But even though Gole is honest about what his plugin’s limitations are, that doesn’t encourage me to recommend it, just further remind me why most people should stay away from it.

Bottom Line

I can’t think of many reasons why someone would want to use this particular plugin. There is almost no reason to use these scripts on your site and, if you do need them, it’s pretty trivial to search for them and paste them into your own HTML. It certainly isn’t much more difficult than using this plugin and there’s no footer to worry about.

All in all, though I want to encourage plugin developers to create tools that can help content creators track and prevent misuse, I think this was a misguided effort. Still, I have to go easy on the author because it is, according to him, his first plugin and it shows both an interest in this particular area as well as some potential.

On that note, there is a lot of promise for WordPress plugins in this area and that’s something I’m going to talk about tomorrow.