Content copy protection. Methods for protecting electronic documents from copying and editing. Combined document protection methods

Since the invention of writing, mankind began to transfer personal, state and universal secrets to suitable material carriers. As soon as the ancestors did not excel in ensuring that the texts were not read by other people's eyes. The most ancient and popular method of protection is rightfully a cryptogram (translated from Greek means "secret writing"). For example, sacred Jewish texts were encrypted by the replacement method - instead of the first letter of the alphabet, the last letter was written, instead of the second - the penultimate one, etc. This ancient cipher is called Atbash.

Steps were also taken to protect the transmitted secret messages from interception and substitution. Usually, armed guards were used for this, but they did not refuse alternative methods either - they frightened them with God's wrath and ancient curses, which was very effective for those years.

People have come up with a great many ways to protect paper documents from copying and editing (substitution). Some of them moved to the "figure", and some were invented specifically to protect electronic documents.

Why protect documents from copying and editing

Basically, copy and edit protection is required for working documents in DOCX and PDF formats. Analytical agencies, design institutes and other companies offering information products provide research results in a secure format to prevent unauthorized use and distribution. It is also important for businesses to provide protection against substitution - to reduce risks, you need to ensure that the document will forever remain unchanged.

However, protection against copying and editing can also be useful for personal purposes, for example, when creating a book, a training course, or providing consulting services. That is, such functionality can be useful to anyone who develops intellectual products and wants to control their distribution.

Protection of electronic documents DOC and PDF today

Let's briefly go over the most common methods.

Marking

You can put information on the document that it has a special status and cannot be edited or copied. Sometimes the marking is made invisible to reveal the "mole" - the source of the leak. In a simple implementation, a point in the document is placed in different places and they track which option will “pop up”. An improved version is the use of specialized software and hardware systems in conjunction with an MFP, which allows you to change the intervals and font size individually for each copy of the document. Such protection is reactive in nature, that is, it allows you to identify the perpetrator upon the discovery of an incident. Next, we will look at methods that are proactive in nature.

Password

The most common and accessible to all way to protect electronic documents from unauthorized access is to set a password for a document or archive. This is usually done by the built-in tools of the program, for example, in the Acrobat application, you can restrict editing, copying content and printing (link to instructions). But you need to consider the following - the file itself can be copied, and if you put the document and password protected in this way on the Internet, then everyone can easily open it.

Digital key access (flash drive)

The method is based on the user having a physical key (flash drive or SD card) to decrypt the document. There is a flash drive - there is access. That is, the file can be copied, but the copy cannot be opened without a certain material medium. This solves the problem of unauthorized distribution, but with limitations. Firstly, a flash drive or SD card costs money, and secondly, it is necessary to ensure the delivery of this item to the user, which increases the cost and makes it difficult to exchange documents online. Thirdly, the user will always have to have this key with him, and, fourthly, any equipment tends to break down - and you will need to negotiate a warranty period and provide a replacement in case of a breakdown.

Access rights management system

This document protection method is primarily used for enterprise users based on Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS). Documents protected by AD RMS are encrypted, and the author can set permissions for who will have access to the files.

List of possible rights restrictions:

• Reading, editing, printing.
• The validity period of the document.
• Forbid email forwarding.
• Prohibit printing of e-mail.

But what if the document just needs to be sent to an external addressee?

Combined document protection methods

All of the above methods have their advantages and disadvantages. Manufacturers of document security systems are constantly working to combine strengths in one solution. The perfect combination seems to be:

• providing access to a document with a password that can be sent by e-mail or dictated by phone;
• binding to a unique material carrier, but so that it does not need to be additionally purchased and delivered to the end user;
• web-based permissions management so you can grant and revoke access to a file in real time;
• display special labels on the document to indicate a special distribution mode.

As a result, a user's computer or mobile device can be used as a unique material carrier, for example, the operating system and processor have their own serial numbers that cannot be faked. This will allow you to control the number of copies of the protected document.

Internet rights management provides DRM. When creating a password, access parameters are set: on how many devices the document can be opened, how long the access will be valid, whether it is possible to quickly revoke access. When the password is activated, all the specified restrictions take effect.

The tags by themselves do not provide protection, but they allow detecting a leak by a digital fingerprint, since a unique combination of numbers and letters displayed on the document is formed for each user.

Now there are several professional solutions on the market based on combined methods for protecting electronic documents from copying and leakage. After analyzing several options, I propose to get acquainted with the services SFContent.com and SFLetter.com.

SFContent.com

A professional online document protection service that includes DRM, user device tagging, watermarks and serial numbers (instead of passwords). This site offers services on a paid basis, but there is a free trial. If you need to provide access to files for no more than 14 days, then you can only use test serial numbers, each time opening a new space (project) in your account.

If 14 days is not enough, you can purchase a license for 30 days. Its cost includes 10 serial numbers with an unlimited period of use. The license gives the right to transform files into a protected format. When the license expires, the files will remain protected and the serial numbers will continue to work, but in order to convert new files to a protected format, you must purchase a license renewal or a license for a new project.

In general, the solution is worthy and really allows you to provide copy and editing protection for documents in PDF, DOCX and a number of other formats. If you have any questions, there is an online chat on sfcontent.com.

SFLetter.com

The developers of this service took care of users a little more than necessary. They created not only a tool for reliable protection of documents from copying and editing, but also a full-fledged e-mail, so that you can be sure that your data will fly to the recipient in integrity and safety.

The main functionality of the service is available for free, such functions as revoking access to a letter, setting a timer for viewing, sending from your own domain name are provided as part of paid tariff plans. Ideal for paid mailings. Serious security technologies are hidden under the simplicity of the interface, but you don’t need to think about them - check the box and the letter with the document is protected and sent to the list of addresses. If you are an author with a responsible approach to information protection, then you are here.

If we talk about the shortcomings of this solution, then for viewing it is required to install a viewer program by analogy with PDF. It is available for all platforms except Linux.

Protecting documents from copying and editing always imposes restrictions on use. It is important to maintain a balance between convenience, security and cost.

This problem is still dangerous for blogs. And imperfect search engines are to blame for this, which until now have not learned to determine for sure who is the true author of this or that article! Shame on them :)

The problem of hacking is no less relevant; two articles with security tips have been written about this on the blog.

Why is content theft happening?

• there are shitty sites selling links that need any content, not necessarily unique, the main thing is that links can be inserted into it. After all, the promotion and quality of these sites is not so important, since they are already spammed with links.
• someone may like your article, and he (perhaps not suspecting that he is doing harm) copies it to another resource
• novice bloggers may not be aware that success cannot be achieved without unique content and they copy everything on their site.
• maybe your competitors decided to annoy or take revenge...:)

There are many methods of combating content theft, I will try to highlight the most effective and real ones.

Ways to protect text from copying on the site:

Well, then it may happen that the search engine will quickly index the article on a third-party resource, and after that it will go to yours and consider you a copy-paste. But even in the opposite case, there is nothing good in the fact that your article will hang somewhere else and even without a link to you. Let's see how you can reduce risks and protect content from copying.

Speed ​​up indexing of your site

You wrote an article, it was immediately stolen from you and posted on a site that is indexed faster than yours. This means that the search engine will quickly visit that site and consider it the author of your article. And you - a copy-pasteur. And for this you can get! And after the article is indexed, there is nothing to be afraid of. But still, it’s not pleasant that someone insolently passes off your beautiful creations as their own.

Notify search engines of your authorship

Sometimes quick site indexing does not help. There are services that automatically steal your articles from the RSS feed as soon as you publish them. For this case, Yandex Webmaster has the "Original texts" function. Every time before publishing a text, add it to Webmaster and Yandex will know that you are the author.

This is done simply: go to Webmaster, section "Site Content" -> "Original Lyrics" -> "Add New Text".

Google also has the ability to confirm authorship, but more on that in a separate article.

Keep track of the uniqueness of articles - manually or using a plugin

You can track uniqueness manually, which is very long. To do this, there are services like text.ru, which will immediately show the site that stole your article. If your site is completely copied by someone, you will see it. But if only one article was stolen, this method is unlikely to help find it.

There is a Posts Compare find Plagiat plugin for WordPress that automatically searches the web for your stolen articles. It will save a lot of time, but there is also a minus - this plugin consumes an incredible amount of resources, which your host will certainly inform you about. As an option, activate it only sometimes for verification, and then deactivate it.

Standard - use the search by the name "Posts Compare find Plagiat". After activating the plugin, go to the section "Parameters" -> "Post Compare". Can be ticked

Now the most interesting thing, for the plugin to work, you need to configure Crone on the server. There is nothing complicated about this, I will show you how it is done on my hosting. If you can't do it on your own, contact the hosting technical support.

Go to the Crone section (task scheduler) and add a new task: executing a php script..php.
Next, set the frequency of the task - every minute.

Now go back to the options section, the plagiarism search results will start to appear there.

Catch and "punish" thieves

Using the previous tip, you found several sites that stole content from you. What to do next?

First of all, write them very polite letters asking them to delete the copied texts. There is no need to threaten and show aggression, it is quite possible that the person did not want to harm you and will gladly delete the article at your request (it happened to me more than once).

If the site administrator does not wish to remove your content, or if you have not received a response at all, you can take action. Send complaints to the domain registrar or hoster of this site. You can try to contact the search engines, although, as practice shows, they are unlikely to answer.

If you have copied the entire site, use the ready-made example of a complaint to the hosting company, you can download it at. Often such letters help, although it all depends on the hosting.

If none of the methods has yielded results, you can even go to court. They say that copyright infringement cases are easily won :) But I have no such experience, so I will not advise anything.

Automatically add a link to your site when copying

It is difficult to call this a means of protecting content from copying, but still, if they copy, then at least they put a link to you! The link will be added to the clipboard automatically when copying the text.

To do this, edit your theme's header.php file - "Header". If you are completely new and do not know how to do this, read. Insert the following code before the closing tag: