Copyrights and the Blogger: Protect What is Yours

Blog Critics’ article “Copyright And The Blogger Syndicate” discusses the ongoing battle between blog syndication and social networking and copyright protection and sums it up beautifully with two instructions to all bloggers:

1. Protect your blog to begin with.

How you go about this, depends largely on whether you’re a contributor to a larger site that handles your formatting, or you run your own blog…

2. Defend your rights.

Invariably, your work will end up somewhere it doesn’t belong…As a lawyer I’m hard-wired to cringe when someone says we’re not needed, but, for the most part, I agree. It just takes time and determination to protect your rights.

Start to protect your blog by putting a copyright statement on your blog. I have one on every post I write as well as the blog itself (in the sidebar). I’ll be soon talking more about registering your blog and other copyright protection measures.

Then defend your rights. In order to protect them, defend them. I outline some simple steps you can take in “What to Do When Someone Steals Your Content” that will help you protect and defend your copyrights.

Acclaimed cartoonist, Gary Larson, wrote on Creators.com Creators Syndicate regarding the posting of his cartoons on people’s private websites. Describing a conversation he had fellow cartoonist, Richard Guindon, on the discussion of their images being “…collected, digitized, and offered up in cyberspace beyond my control”.

Trying to find the words to express his emotions, Richard summed up their aversion to this by saying:

It’s like having someone else write in your diary.

As horrible as that is, especially if it’s your mother, Gary Larson explained that he takes the illegal use of his images personally:

These cartoons are my ‘children’, of sorts, and like a parent, I’m concerned about where they go at night without telling me. And, seeing them at someone’s website is like getting the call at 2:00 a.m. that goes, ‘Uh, Dad, you’re not going to like this much, but guess where I am.’

So where are your children tonight?

Related Articles

• What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content
• AntiLeech Splog Stopper: Fighting Back Against Content Thieves
• Digital Fingerprints Help Track Blog Content Theft
• The Bitacle Battle of Blogs
• Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements
• How To Spot a Splog
• The Growing Trends in Content Theft: Scraping Blog Feeds
• Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging
• What are Feeds?
• Maxpower’s Digital Fingerprint WordPress Plugin Updated

---

Site Search Tags: copyright, copyright protection, copyright infringement, copyright violation, content theft, stealing content, scraper, scraping, blogs, feeds, feed scraping, blog scraping, digital fingerprint, copyright myths, antileech, wordpress, wordpress plugins, fighting back, stop splogs, splog, splogging, how to spot a splog, protect your blog
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network