Preventing design theft. A few tricks of the trade

As designers most of us have been victim at some time or other to design theft. Those little warts of the web that come along and think that it’s ok to rip off your web design. So what do you do when someone steals your design? I fell victim to design rip off around July of last year – some random guy decided to copy our design, and change the main image – but stupidly left the CSS links intact – linking back to me, and therefore showing up in my referral logs. Sometimes we aren’t so lucky, and the design theft goes unnoticed until someone points it out.

The normal recourse for this sort of thing (and works rather well) is to report the offending site to the web host hosting it. Assuming that the thief in question hasn’t responded well to gentle persuasion, it may be in breach of their hosting agreement. But I’m a big believer in prevention being better than cure.

So lets change things for the better – we can block User Agents from accessing our sites – so why not block those web scrapers that rip content and design directly? Lets face it those that decide to rip off a website aren’t too bright, this should help prevent the majority of design stealing.

PHP code

Php makes things easy pie with mod_rewrite – as shown below. This should block about 99% of the screenscrapers out there at the minute.

RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BlackWidow [OR]RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Bot\ mailto:craftbot@yahoo.com [OR]RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ChinaClaw [OR]RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Custo [OR]RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^DISCo [OR]RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Download\ Demon [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^eCatch [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EirGrabber [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailSiphon [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailWolf [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Express\ WebPictures [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ExtractorPro [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EyeNetIE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FlashGet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetRight [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetWeb! [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go!Zilla [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go-Ahead-Got-It [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GrabNet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Grafula [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HMView [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} HTTrack [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image\ Stripper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image\ Sucker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy\ Library [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^InterGET [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Internet\ Ninja [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JetCar [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JOC\ Web\ Spider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^larbin [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^LeechFTP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mass\ Downloader [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MIDown\ tool [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mister\ PiX [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Navroad [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NearSite [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetAnts [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Net\ Vampire [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetZIP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Octopus [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline\ Explorer [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline\ Navigator [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^PageGrabber [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Papa\ Foto [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pavuk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pcBrowser [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^RealDownload [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ReGet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SiteSnagger [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SmartDownload [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperHTTP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Surfbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^tAkeOut [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Teleport\ Pro [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^VoidEYE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web\ Image\ Collector [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web\ Sucker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebAuto [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebCopier [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebFetch [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebGo\ IS [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebLeacher [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebReaper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebSauger [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website\ eXtractor [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website\ Quester [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebStripper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebWhacker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebZIP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Widow [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WWWOFFLE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon\ WebSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

ASP Code

You should just be able to create an include file and drop this in.

<% Sub AddViolation(objDict, strWord)
'Adds a violation (a robot in this case)
objDict.Add strWord, False
End Sub
Function CheckStringForViolations(strString, objDict)
'Determines if the string strString has any violations
Dim bolViolations
bolViolations = False
Dim strKey
For Each strKey in objDict
If InStr(1, strString, strKey, vbTextCompare) > 0
bolViolations = True
objDict(strKey) = True
End If
Next
CheckStringForViolations = bolViolations
End Function
Dim objDictViolations
Set objDictViolations = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")
AddViolation objDictViolations, "craftbot@yahoo.com"
AddViolation objDictViolations, "ChinaClaw"
AddViolation objDictViolations, "DISCo"
AddViolation objDictViolations, "Download Demon"
AddViolation objDictViolations, "eCatch"
AddViolation objDictViolations, "EirGrabber"
AddViolation objDictViolations, "EmailSiphon"
AddViolation objDictViolations, "EmailWolf"
Dim strCheck, strKey
strCheck = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT")
If Len(strCheck) > 0 then
If CheckStringForViolations(strCheck, objDictViolations) then
Response.Redirect("disallowed.asp")
Else
End If
End If
%>

I’ll be putting together a ASP.NET version – using HTTP Handlers soon. Feel free to rewrite this code and link up in the comments if you are using a different platform