Why protect blog content?

People steal. Especially online, where acquisition only requires a few mouse clicks. Many aren't even aware they're violating intellectual property (IP) rights, which vary from culture to culture (The south-Alaskan Tlingit have some of the world's most stringent concepts. To them, a tale is a present, bestowed from one person to another. Re-gifting is a serious offense, never mind mass-replicating a story in print...)

Is it that big a deal if someone swipes a few hundred words? For some, intellectual property theft violates their creativity and privacy. Others can shrug it off as the give-and-take of the online world. But how would you feel about thousands of words? Or hundreds of thousands even? While editing for a Michelin guidebook, I stumbled across the entire text translated from the Italian version into poor English, seemingly via Babelfish or a similar program (never mind that a proper English manuscript existed).

Precise numbers remain rare. But the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates stolen IP costs companies a collective $250 billion each year.

Amplified, even the smallest act of piracy has serious repercussions, especially in a flailing economy that's based more and more on intellectual property. In February 2010, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) estimated that 41 percent of all PC software is stolen. Its President and CEO Robert Holleyman noted this "theft totals nearly $53 billion a year, $31 billion directly from US companies. We would never tolerate having four out of every 10 cars on the road be stolen, yet that is the very problem the software industry faces."

Ironically, illegal downloads aren't the main culprit, but rather businesses and governments around the globe, who duplicate unauthorized software. Trimming that by 10% would create 600,000 new jobs and deliver $24 billion in tax revenues, a BSA study explained.

Sounds like something that just happens to the big guys, right? But consider this: the average book runs 60,000–90,000 words. Post 500-word entries three times a week and you hit that threshold in 10 months. Could you stand by while someone else profits over a year's – or years' – worth of your work?

The decision to share content can benefit us all – from software to art sources and user-generated sites. But it should be just that: a decision.

Yours. Not some grabby freeloader's.

Strike back at copyright thieves

Unique pages boost your SEO, which effects your traffic, authority and advertising income. When robbers raid your material, they're stealing just as much as any pickpocket ... just a little more subtly.

Many authors –especially those who began as hobbyists, not professionals – shrug and chalk digital piracy up to the nature of the web. But as content increasingly becomes currency in the new freeconomics, creators need to fight their corner. You labored over that material, investing in education and quite possibly hardware to make it possible, not to mention the time and mental wattage. Don't let some lazy goober profit off your efforts.

IP Piracy? Not in my backyard!

We already touched upon the Creative Commons as a way to share content to varying degrees. Remember that the knife cuts both ways: you can borrow others' material but also, potentially, license your own. Learn more here about good practice, especially for podcasts and other multimedia.

Some copyright holders take steps to monitor distribution and use of their works. This could range from a digital watermark on an image or video file to a copy-protection scheme. Tampering with these is illegal, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If someone violates your rights, you can issue a take-down notice. Patent Attorney Gene Quinn offers an accessible walk-through of the process on IPWatchdog.com, including the WHOIS lookup and a sample letter.

Thanks to a simple "vanity Google" – searching one's own name – I once caught a blatant text grab. A blogger had copied an investigative newspaper story off my website, from my byline to The Daily's copyright notice. A quick trawl through his site revealed little original content: he appeared to be a scraper, not a misguided fan. After the "author" ignored a takedown request, I wrote to his hoster, outlining the situation and asking for the post to be removed. Google wiped the whole blog.

To take action, you need to spot the violation. Teachers have long known about software for detecting plagiarism. Products like Turnitin, Eve2 and CopyCatch can also aid authors. Even an advanced Google search on a distinctive phrase can be productive.

A few other tactics:

1. Create a Google Alert for key terms.
2. Paste text from posts into Google's Blog Search.
3. Copyscape notices. These deter some scroungers, but you can also search for duplicates of your pages at this site.
4. MyFreeCopyright issues a badge with a unique code to embed on your blog. It stores a digital fingerprint of your original work, so you can prove ownership.
5. Services like Tynt can detail copy activity on your site – and even automatically add a link back to your blog with every paste.
6. Forbid right-click captures with this code inside body tags.
7. Email entries to yourself, establishing a "paper" trail that demonstrates authorship and date published. In Blogger, the drill is Settings>Email>Blogsend Address. Most folks prefer to use a free web-based account dedicated solely to this purpose.
   
   This also is handy to back up your entries. Recently, in an epic cut-and-paste flail, I managed to overwrite a file on Blogger and my home computer. Luckily Google's cache contained a five-day-old snapshot of the site, so I managed to restore the post (whether it should be is another question: I wasn't happy with that text...).
   
   Conduct a standard search, but rather than clicking the headline, click on the grey "cache" link beside the green URL. Then go to View>Page Source on your browser and grab the relevant text. The Wayback Machine is another digital time capsule handy in such moments.
   
8. Post a copyright notice, although one is no longer required for legal protection of original content. (Those of you who live in America may recall the ubiquitous loop of It's a Wonderful Life screening from 1974–1993, seemingly nonstop? That's thanks to old laws, which required re-application 28 years after a film's release. Republic Pictures finally seized control again, arguing the movie was a derivative work of a short story, for which it owned adaptation rights. Life's much easier now for creative types, especially since we don't have to watch Jimmy Stewart blubbing endlessly...)
   
   A copyright notice can deter would-be plagiarists, by signalling that you care enough to take preventative measures and thus are more likely to pursue DCMA takedown options and legal action. Much like a bicycle lock, notices stop opportunistic thieves (anyone truly determined will take your Schwinn or your story regardless. But a little effort can ward off impulse-grabbers...).
   
   Most bloggers feature copyright notices in a footer, the area at the bottom of a web page. Other common items there include links to privacy policies, contact information, and sometimes addition navigation links. To add a copyright notice to your blog's footer:

• From the Dashboard, click Layout followed by the "Add a Gadget" link in the blog footer area. (screenshot)
• Select the Text gadget. (screenshot)
• Click "Edit HTML" to switch to HTML edit mode. (screenshot)
• Leave the Title field blank. Enter the following text into the content field. (screenshot)

• <p style="text-align: center;">All content &copy;2009 Mike Keran.  All rights reserved.</p>

• (Don't forget to change Mike's to yours!)
• Click Save in the Configure Text dialog. Click Preview to double check how the new footer looks, then click Save to finalize the changes to your blog's layout.
• The Copyright Office's website details more exact wording.

But I like to share my toys!

Guard your own site from hoster smack-downs by being accessible. Maybe you've done everything right, sourcing images from Flickr's CC-licensed pool and Wikimedia Commons, but someone uploaded art he or she didn't own. Make sure a copyright holder could contact you without having to take heavy-handed action.

Receive an alert whenever someone leaves a message, no matter how old the post: Settings>Comments>Comment Notification Email down the bottom.

Leave some email avenue open. Yes, some junky offers for fat-burning products and Nigerian net scams will probably wriggle through as a result. That's why I rely on Hotmail and gmail more than my vanity domain popmail accounts; I'd rather Microsoft and Google finesse the spam filters...

A few ways to remain contractible:
1. Amanda's approach: link through to a professional portfolio site complete with an email, unlisted phone number and PO Box. As a journalist, I want folks to reach me easily with assignments, story tips and press-trip offers.
2. Mike's tecchie approach: web form.
3. Contain the address in an image, which spambots can't crawl. This can be annoying for users, though, who have to retype the characters.
4. Write it out, omitting the "@" to foil the spiders. For example: frogwad (at) hotmail.com. This can pop easily into the "About Me" box, editable under Layout>Page Elements. To keep this text short, consider linking to a Google Profile: My Account>Create a Public Profile> Add Links towards the bottom of the page.

Don't grow up to be a pirate!

Guard your own site from hoster smack-downs by being accessible. Maybe you've done everything right, sourcing images from Flickr's CC-licensed pool and Wikimedia Commons, but someone uploaded art he or she didn't own. Make sure a copyright holder could contact you without having to take heavy-handed action.

Receive an alert whenever someone leaves a message, no matter how old the post: Settings>Comments>Comment Notification Email down the bottom.

Leave some email avenue open. Yes, some junky offers for fat-burning products and Nigerian net scams will probably wriggle through as a result. That's why I rely on Hotmail and gmail more than my vanity domain popmail accounts; I'd rather Microsoft and Google finesse the spam filters...

A few ways to remain contractible:
1. Amanda's approach: link through to a professional portfolio site complete with an email, unlisted phone number and PO Box. As a journalist, I want folks to reach me easily with assignments, story tips and press-trip offers.
2. Mike's tecchie approach: web form.
3. Contain the address in an image, which spambots can't crawl. This can be annoying for users, though, who have to retype the characters.
4. Write it out, omitting the "@" to foil the spiders. For example: frogwad (at) hotmail.com. This can pop easily into the "About Me" box, editable under Layout>Page Elements. To keep this text short, consider linking to a Google Profile: My Account>Create a Public Profile> Add Links towards the bottom of the page.

 

Redefining intellectual property rights

A lot of what we all love about the web – the cheap, the easy, the breadth, the wildcat freedom from the mainstream media's "elite" stranglehold – stems from GNU's Stallman, Linux's Linus Torvalds and other visionaries. They lay the philosophical groundwork for the very platforms we're blogging on.

Their counterparts on the "content" frontier also are shaking things up. Foremost among them is Lawrence Lessig, a law prof turning copyright on its ear. As he notes in Free Culture: "the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries."

We're riding that wave, one of content's biggest since Gutenberg's movable type inspiration of 1439. Not shabby, eh?

"Digital technologies," Lessig continues, "tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today."

Creative Commons License – an intro

Lessig helped found the Creative Commons (CC), a system similar to the open-source GPL license. Whenever we author a creative work – write an essay, take a photo or paint a picture – we own its copyright, even without registering it. Basically this requires anyone who wishes to use our material to ask, and potentially pay, us. A CC license relaxes these restrictions by varying degrees, allowing people to recycle our content in certain situations.

The CC website details the licenses and their nuances here. Flickr breaks it all down in more human language, however:

Attribution
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

The noncommercial licenses cause no shortage of discussion online. For example, if you place a noncommercially licensed photo from Flickr, but have a few Google AdSense ads along the side, does that make your blog a commercial enterprise? What if the blog supporting a business? Unfortunately, no solid answers exist until a body of case law develops.

Until then, here's our non-lawyerly take on things: if the licensed work isn't selling a product, then it is a noncommercial use. Take the Flickr photo and blog example above: all those uses would be noncommercial. But, if you were selling your book on your blog and posted a Flickr photo in the ad, then you would violate the noncommercial clause.

Cautious bloggers can always buy commercially licensed photos from microstock photo agencies, which can charge as little as 14 cents. These image archives often contain lucky shots by amateurs and cutting-room-floor sweepings by professionals, all royalty-free. Some popular options include Dreamstime, Shutterstock, BigStockPhoto, Fotolia and the original agency iStockPhoto.

Yes, sharing can go horribly, horribly wrong

Unsurprisingly, rogues have already abused these communistic practices. In the highest profile case, Virgin Mobile took 100 images off Flickr for an ad campaign. Young Alison Chang of Texas unwittingly – and without pay – starred in one of the promotions. Humiliatingly, she became known as the "dump your pen friend girl". Her family's suing Virgin Mobile, but also CC for a breach of duty, "by failing, among other things, to adequately educate and warn [the uploader]... of the meaning of commercial use and the ramifications and effects of entering into a license allowing such use."

CC nutshells its side of the story here. What's most fascinating is the lawyer's tactic, which revolves around the girl's right of privacy, not the licensing brouhaha.

Powerblog Boing Boing also stumbled, publishing a 500-word piece by sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin with an erroneous CC license. Ironically, the poster was Cory Doctorow, a former professor who once lectured on copyright at the University of Southern California. As this rant noted: "If even the most dedicated, foaming-at-the-mouth Commons evangelists can't use it properly – what hope do us mortals have?"

It's certainly tricky: basically we're building the airplane in mid-flight, as user-generated content booms. But don't despair. We'll explore more tips for being a good cyber-citizen and protecting your own work in the last week.