Copyright and Licensing are two separate topics which I will attempt to cover in a nutshell here. However both topics are very vast and will apply differently depending on the type of blog you are running. It’s a good idea though to at least think about these topics in regards to your blog and more specifically how they may or may not apply to you. Also this post will mainly cover material that you have personally generated and only briefly touch on displaying/publishing copyrighted material.

COPYRIGHT

Is defined by Websters as:

The right of an author or his assignee, under statute, to print and publish his literary or artistic work, exclusively of all other persons. This right may be had in maps, charts, engravings, plays, and musical compositions, as well as in books. [Websters 1913]

When you create an original work you automatically own the copyright to it whether you publish a copyright notice or not. [According to the Berne Convention]. However, there is specific criteria that must be adhered to in order to qualify for copyright status:

  • a work must be “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.”
  • the work must be original — that is, independently created by the author. It doesn’t matter if an author’s creation is similar to existing works, or even if it is arguably lacking in quality, ingenuity or aesthetic merit. So long as the author toils without copying from someone else, the results are protected by copyright.
  • The work must be the result of at least some creative effort on the part of its author.

[Excerpted from Stanford Copyright and Fair Use - FAQ]

Generally a website and the majority of posts will fall under this category. So by having the site your work is already copyrighted. So then what’s the big deal? — Well the main reason I’m bringing up copyright is to further my point regarding licensing.

Most blogs automatically put a copyright notice down at the bottom of your page with the current year listed. I will usually edit that to cover the entire period of time my blog has been running. Additionally you could make your copyright line slightly more specific such as:

Unless noted otherwise all content copyrighted 2001-2007 by D. Johnson.

If you do this you should note any time you display excerpts of copyrighted content.

LICENSING

Since we have established that the material you post/display on your blog is copyrighted. We come to the issue of licensing which I think is especially important if you post pictures, videos or editorials on your blog. Licensing is defined as “to permit or authorize the use of”. In many cases if you do not have a license up generally speaking if someone uses your work you should contact them and let them know that they are publishing copyrighted material. However there are times where you may want to be a little more specific about who can publish your material and under what stipulations.

For example say I’d be fine with another personal blog republishing an article of mine, but if a newspaper or other commercial entity republished it I may want them to ask for permission first. There’s a pretty cool site called Creative Commons that provides different types of licenses that you can use, and their site is pretty self explanatory so I won’t get into too many details. But basically you can generate a pretty specific type of license that can include or exclude certain parties.

The reason I personally feel licensing is so important is I have some friends who have had personal photographs which they had up on their website displayed in articles and commercial media. This was done without their consent and of course they were rather annoyed by it. If your website had a straightforward license that excluded all commercial works including news media without your expressed permission this may have been avoided.

Now that’s not to say that by adding a license to your site that you would be free of such scenarios, but it does add an extra safe guard and a way for you to quickly show that you did not consent to the publishing of said material.

There are also times when you may want to release all the works of your website into the public domain in which case you may want to add a copyleft notice to your website so that folks know they are free to use your material under certain more “free” stipulations, though a license that specifies such use is still important.

And remember that if you publish material that doesn’t belong to you, make sure you have permission to do so and provide the required attribution lines, etc. That includes if you are publishing a picture that someone else took. Since, whoever is the one who pulled the trigger on the camera, they own the copyright.

I’ll get a little more into copyrighted material and republishing it a little further along in this series.

As with all posts in this series I do not presume to be an authority on these topics or have covered them in enough detail so feel free to share your opinions in the comments. And if your post doesn’t show up right away, don’t worry I will be sure to approve it.