Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

This article is about the steps you can take to apply copyright protection to your blog.

Overview

Previously, I've described how copyright applies to blogs in very general terms.

This is a more detailed look at the things to consider if you want to protect your "stuff" (ie words, pictures, tunes, blog-design, code, etc) from being used by other people without permission.  It covers:

• Deciding what restrictions you want to apply
• Telling readers what the policies are
• Physically stopping people from making copies of your work
• Making it obvious when your work is copied

Decide on your copyright policy

The first step in applying copyright to your blog is deciding whether people are allowed to make copies of your work, and under what conditions.

Many people initially say "it's mine, no one else can make any copies".

But some people want to share their materials and aren't looking for anything in return - hence the open copyright and Creative Commons approaches.  

Other people are willing to share provided they get some of the credit for doing the work and/or some money.  Both the Wall Street Journal (Curse of the Greedy Copyright Holders and Their Fee-Seeking Lawyers) and YouTube's Head of User Experience (Margaret Gould Stewart: How YouTube thinks about copyright - as presented at TED) have some pretty good arguments about how sharing can make more revenue in the long run.  And thinking about what you might, realistically, do when someone breaks the law and makes a copy of your material may make a policy that allows copies-provided-credit-is-given more appealing.

Ultimately the decision about what policies to apply is yours - but you need to decide what policies you're going to follow before you can do anything about them.

Telling people what they can (or cannot) do

Once you've decided what copyright rules apply to your blog, it's good to tell your blog-readers what permissions you are willing to give for use of your material:

• If you don't want to give any general permissions, you might put text with the phrase "© YOUR-BLOG-NAME" in a prominent position.
  If you have a designer template, then the Attributes gadget already has a field where you can put copyright, provided you haven't removed it.    Or you may just want to add a text-gadget the same way you would add any other type of gadget - if you put it above or below your Blog Post gadget, then it will show up with every single post including ones that you've already published.

• If you are willing to give permission, but only on a case-by-case basis - say so.  And tell people how they can get in touch to discuss using your work.

• If you are happy to give some general permissions (eg people can copy your material so long as they attribute it to you), you might investigate the Creative Commons options, and put a statement from them on your site.  Their site has a automated tool for adding a gadget, or you may like to add the HTML to your blog yourself.

• To protect photographs or artworks, you could put a copyright statement right inside the image, either very obviously or as a faded-yet-visible watermark.  That way, anyone who sees a copy that someone has made will know that they photos are really yours.

Stopping people from copying your work

Physically stopping people from being about to make copies of  work is another approach.

There are scripts that you can add to your blog that disable the right-click option for anyone who is viewing the page: this makes it harder to copy-and-paste text or to save pictures.  However I don't recommend this approach: it's easy for tech-savvy people to disable the scripts or to work around them (eg to look at your page source code and copy the picture location from it), and because it stops your viewers from doing other things (eg opening links in a new window) that they should be able to do.

Another option is to stop people from copying text from your blog. As with disabling right-click, I don't much like this approach, and don't use it: as with disabling right-clicks, it doesn't apply to RSS-feed or email subscribers, and a determined copycat can either disable Javascript, or take a screen shot and OCR it, or even just re-type the content.  But it might be suitable for some blogs.   To do it, add this CSS rule to your template:

.post-body {
-webkit-touch-callout: none;
-khtml-user-select: none;
-moz-user-select: -moz-none;
-ms-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
}

One way to protect photographs is to save them as a fairly low resolution before you upload them:  this means they look ok web-pages (yours and anyone else's), but have very low quality if people try to print them or use them in places like a newspaper.   If you don't want to reduce the resolution, you can remove the ability to click on them, so that they don't open in a new window:  this won't stop people who can read the source HTML behind your page, but it will deter your average photo-copier.

If you want to protect music you have composed or videos you've made, you might investigate registering your content with YouTube's Audio ID and Video ID system.   This won't stop other people from making copies of your work in other places, but it will stop them from uploading copies (or derived works, eg their own video with some of your music) back to YouTube - or at least give you some options for saying what should happen if someone tries to do so.

Make copies obvious

Rather than trying to stop people from making copies, an other approach is to simply make the original source obvious to anyone who looks at the copy.

Watermarks:

Adding a some partially-transparent text to photos or videos deters people who might copy your work (because it will be obvious that they've copied it), and makes the original source clear to anyone who sees a copy.  Most photo-manipulation tools now have tools for adding text to photos.  Make sure you keep a safe high-quality, un-watermarked copy of any  photos that you care about, as well as showing the altered one on your blog.

Cross-linking:

Long-term Blogger-HAT readers will have noticed that I'm putting more and more links to related articles into each post. I started doing this to be helpful (eg did you know you can add a Facebook "like" or "send button" button to individual posts as well as to your whole blog?)), and to stop repeating myself. But it's also a good tools for discouraging determined copy-cats:  they don't really want to link to me, so if they use my material they'll have to edit lots of links). And the casual or automated ones (who don't bother editing the links) just end up sending traffic to me.

Use features that are built into other file types:

If you use your blog to distribute other items (eg templates, eBooks, diagrams), you might like to consider more subtle ways of either is telling people about the copyright provisions, or just giving yourself the credit for work you've done.

Example:  one of my sites gives away planning templates that are made with MS Word and PowerPoint.  I'm happy for them to be copied and changed, provided the copyright attribution is left intact.  Microsoft's File / Properties feature has a link to my website in each template, and often in Windows Explorer these values are shown when someone hovers their mouse of the files.  Over time I expect it to be a good tool for building the recognition of my blog.

"Signing" your RSS feed

If you put  a statement, crediting your blog as the source into your RSS feed, then every single item that is posted has your blog-name attached: copycats either need to edit it out manually, or leave it in and show the world where they got their content from.

For example the line I have added to the feed of the blog you are reading right now is:

This article is © Copyright – All rights reserved - Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.
You may publish translated versions of this article on non-English language blogs provided you acknowledge Blogger-Hints-and-Tips as the original source.

Blogger has a feature for setting this up:

1. Go to Settings > Other > Site Feed 
2. Add the words you want to use to the Post feed footer box, 
3. Click Save Settings.

Registering your work with a copyright-service

There are a number of services around that let you "register" the copyright for an item.  This might give you peace-of-mind, or evidence to use in certain legal situations.

But it won't make any difference to whether people make unauthorised copies of your blog-contents, so I'm not going into details about it here.

The next article in this series, Dealing with people who have copied your work, has more detail about how these services work and what they're actually useful for - and suggestions about some other, possibly more useful, steps you can take.

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Related Articles:

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers, an Introduction

Taking action when someone has made an unauthorised copy of material from your blog

How to add a gadget, using Blogger

Putting 3rd party HTML (eg a Creative Commons licence) into your Blog

Stopping the pictures in your blog from being "clickable"

Finding a Picture's location (URL) in Picasa-web-albums

Removing the Attribution Gadget from your Blog

Types of blogger template.

Taking action when someone has copied your blog without permission

This article is about the steps you can take when someone has made an unauthorized copy of something that is published on your blog.

Finding out that your blog has been copied

Previously, I've described how copyright applies to blogs in very general terms, and the steps you can take to apply copyright protection to your blog.

Even if you follow these these steps, if you put material onto the internet it is quite likely that someone will copy it.

This maybe done out of naivety, or as a deliberate attempt to rip you off, or as part of an organised spam-blogging ("splogging") operation.

There are several way you might find out that someone has copied your work:

• You, or your friends, notice it
  Maybe you or one of you readers searched for a certain phrase and you found your content elsewhere.  Or maybe you found a link to an identical post on a help-forum or discussion board.  If you use a lot of in-post linking (ie you link to another article in your content), and notice you are getting a lot of visits from somewhere unusual, then you might visit that site and find your post copied word-for-word, including the unchanged links.

• Google's spam bots notice it:  
  If you get an email or a notice saying that your blog has been identified as potential spam, then one of the possibilities is that a real spammer has chosen your content.

If you found out that someone has copied you work because Google's spam-bots detected the problem, then you simply need to follow the instructions in the email that Google sent you, or consult the Blogger Help Forums.  In short, you will be advised about a four step process that you need to follow.   This is tedious, but the nice part is that Google is dealing with the copy-cat for you, and (if you're not a spammer) you'll get your blog back.

If you find out some other way, then you need to decide what do to about the problem (if indeed you believe is is a problem).   This is closely linked to what you want to achieve - this could be any of:

• Do nothing - if you don't mind being copied, and you're willing to risk being incorrectly identified as a spammer
• Getting the copied work taken down
• Leaving the copy in place, with your name or URL  added beside it
• Being paid compensation
• Receiving a public apology

and I'm sure there are other possible remedies, too.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you can plan what steps you need to take, based on the notes in the next section.

Reality check:  There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and wanting to receive $10M compensation.  But  unless you can afford really good lawyers, it might be a good idea to have a backup plan which involves a realistic goal too, eg having your name added to the copyright materials, or having them taken down.

Steps for resolving copyright problems

Start the easy way

Unless you're certain that the copying was deliberate and malicious, the first step is most cases is to send a nice email to the person who made the copy, telling them that it's yours and what you want done about it.  (You might need to just leave a comment on their blog, if no email address is provided.)

Report them to their internet service provider

The obvious first step if politeness doesn't work is to complain to their web-host:

• If they use Blogger (ie their URL is WHATEVER.blogspot.com, or they have a custom domain but the source-code on their site looks like Blogger code),
  then you should contact Google through this page:   http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html 
  Google have a very thorough process for dealing with claims of content stealing - and if the other site that you say has stolen your work is also published in Blogger, they can look at the dates in their database to see who actually published it first.
  Make sure that you read all the details of Blogger's policies before you submit a complaint:  they don't like malicious complaints, and you could be fined quite heavily if you claim that you own something which you don't really own.

• If the person who has copied your work isn't using Blogger, you may need to do some detective work with whois (use Google-search it to find a whois service for the domain you're looking for) to see   who the host is, and what process this host uses to resolve copy-right complaints. 
  This could be particularly difficult to do if they're not located in the same country that you are (so their laws will be different), or if they use a different language.

• If the person who has copied your work has put it into YouTube, you can use information and tools on  YouTube's opyright page.

Complain to other services:

If their web-service-provider can't or won't help, then you could try reporting them to other services that the use.  

For instance many websites are also on Facebook:  if the contents includes your material, or links to a website that's distributing your copyright material, you may be able to use Facebook's intellectual property violation reporting process.  (I haven't tried it myself, but have been told that this can be particularly effective.)

If they show advertising on their site, then complaining to either the advertisers, or to the company that organises the advertising programme, may be effective.  AdSense is quite sensitive to not having it's ads shown along with copyright violations, and provides a policy violation reporting form that you can let them know about the problem.

Charge them

Some people have had success from sending the offender a bill for use of your work.  This takes a bit of thought:  if they pay the invoice, then legally you may have licensed them to use your work for far less than it is worth.   On the other hand, if the amount that you ask them for is ridiculously high, they will probably just laugh and ignore you.

Threaten legal action

This can be fun:  write a very formal-sounding letter demanding that they cease-and-desist from using your work (name it very specifically) by a certain date, and advising that failure to do so may incur penalties including but not limited to commencement of legal proceedings for in which you will be looking for legal expenses as well as damaged incurred.  

If you would actually be willing to sue the person (see the section below), then consult a lawyer, and get them to send the letter.   But if there's no chance that you actually will sue  (and most bloggers simply don't have the time, resources or levels of proof to do so), just make the letter sound good.   If necessary, get a friend who can write pompous-sounding letters to draft it for you.    Send it by regular mail - emails are too easily ignored - and make it look official.

Finding the address to send a letter to can be a challenge - one option is to scour your copy-cat's work, and see if you can find their company or personal details on LinkedIn (most are smart enough to hide themselves on Facebook).    And if you can, then complaining to their boss may be an option, too, depending on your niche and whether their action might be harming their company's reputation.

Legal action

If all else fails, another option is to sue the person or organisation that copied your work.  If you or the copy-cat are in the USA, then the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides an approach for this.   But if you and they are in different countries, then different laws and processes may apply.  But no matter where you are, two things are likely:

• You will need to hire a lawyer - so it may be expensive and take a lot of time, and

• You may need to prove that you really did create the work, and when it was made.   

The second point is where copyright registration services come in to play:  they provide evidence that you really had created the work as at a certain date.  Unfortunately this is one of the ironies of copyright:  listing your material with a copyright service does nothing to stop anyone using it.  But if you don't list it shortly after it's created, you probably won't have any evidence if you ever get to the point of wanting to sue (or even formally complain about) someone who has copied your work.

There are some other issues with copyright services too:

• It can be difficult to list a blog, which by its nature has different material being loaded very frequently.
• You won't necessarily know which services(s) to register with - because you don't know where someone who copies your work is located, so you won't know what services a court in your country will accept evidence from.

So, while I'm not advising you to avoid the registration services altogether, it's important carefully to choose when and how to use them.

Peer pressure / Name-and-shame

If the legal approach doesn't work, or would be too expensive, then another option is to use social pressure to convince your copy-cat that they need to stop copying your work etc.  This can take a range of formats - eg, if a local small business has copied your photograph and isn't willing to compensate you, you might get all your friends to contact the business and threaten not to buy there again.   Or you might start a Facebook campaign, or put a video on YouTube telling your side of a story.   Whatever you do, make sure you that you:

• Really know what you want to achieve:  fame, a pay-off to stop the campaign etc
• Consider the risks (ie what could go wrong) and whether they're worth it
• Don't break the law yourself (it's not worth it, especially if you're the small guy), and
• Think strategically about what you might do, and how this could affect the relationships in your area or niche:  some people are just too much trouble to have an enemies.

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DISCLAIMER

This article contains general advice about the copyright issues faced by people who use Blogger.   It cannot cover every possible case or specific legal systems. 

If you need legal advice about a particular situation, consult a lawyer, ideally one who is familiar with copyright law in your country.

I do not, under any circumstances, suggest using illegal approaches - threats of violence, sabotage, etc.

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Related Articles

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers, an Introduction

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting 3rd party HTML (eg a Creative Commons licence) into your Blog

Removing the Attribution Gadget from your Blog

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers

This article presents a very short intoduction to issues of copyright, and how they apply to bloggers and their blogs.

DISCLAIMER

This article contains general advice about the copyright issues faced by people who use Blogger.   It cannot cover every possible case or specific legal systems.  If you need legal advice about particular issues, consult a lawyer, ideally one who is familiar with copyright law in your country and/or internationally.

What does "Copyright" mean?

In most countries, the law says that as soon as you create something (eg write an article, take a photograph, draw a picture, compose a tune, draw a map, make a slideshow), you own the "rights" to it for for a certain amount of time, usually until a number of years after you die.  And they exist just because you created the item:  there is no need to register it in any way.

While the rights apply (ie the thing you created is still "under copyright") other people are not allowed make a copy of it - in any format - without your permission.  Once the rights have ended, the item becomes "public domain" and other people are free to make copies of it.

If someone does make a copy without your permission, then they are breaking the law and legal action can be taken against them.   How this happens (criminal charge, private prosecution, etc) is different from country to country.  But breaking copyright is normally a "civil law" issue, local law-enforcement officials (police, etc) don't get involved, and it's up to you to prove that you owned the rights in the first place.

Consequences for bloggers

In short, what this means for people who righr blogs is that:

• You "own" the stuff (words, pictures, videos layouts, etc) that you create

• If other people copy it without your permission, they're breaking the law

• If people copy your stuff, it's over to you to do something about it - if you want to.

• If you copy other people's stuff without their permission, you are breaking the law.

Another important point is that copyright only applies to specific works, not to ideas.  For example:

• It's not ok for someone to make a direct copy of your picture, but generally they can make a similar photo themselves and use it

• It's not ok for someone to copy-and-paste a recipe that you invented, but it is ok if they invent a very similar item and type up the recipe themselves.

Of course this is a very broad statement.  There are detailed laws about Patents (the legal way of protecting ideas), about derived works (creations that are based on a work, but not quite the same as it), and fair use.   These laws vary between countries, so it is impossible to go into any more detail about them here.

Next:

• Things you can do in your blog to protect your work from being copied, and 
• Actions you can take against people who have made unauthorised copies of your work.

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Related Articles:

Protecting your blog from being copied

Taking action against unauthorised copies of your work

Assessing an idea for a new Blog

Removing the Attribution Gadget from your Blog

Types of blogger template.