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.

Open Source Software

As you start to deploy more multimedia, it's helpful to understand the movements that underpin the explosion of user-generated content – and how best to navigate some of their key issues as a blogger.

First off, take a look at your tools. Chances are good that many owe their existence to the Free Software movement: the computer world's Summer of Love, which stretched from the 70s into the mid-80s. Developers decided to share code around, instead of hoarding trade secrets. And this cooperation started a tsunami of programs and widgets.

A quirk of the English language caused a great deal of confusion around the word "free," referring here to a freedom to distribute the software as opposed to price. (Think "free speech," not "free beer".) To avoid seeming anti-commercial, geek-speak shifted to the term "open source". In fact, there are no restrictions on charging money for open source software – many companies prosper providing easy installation packages and support for often complex systems.

The key to the open source software is the license, the most common of which is the GNU General Public License (GPL), launched by Richard Stallman – an American hacker, developer and software freedom activist – in 1983. In short, it allows anyone to download the code for any open source project and modify at will. However, if they try to sell those changes as a new product, they have to make the source code available as well. Granted it's a little more complicated than that, but you get the gist...

Proprietary developers, like Microsoft, claim that sharing intel makes it easier for someone to find and exploit flaws. Thus, they argue, maintaining opaque source code provides security itself. Open-source advocates counter that when bugs are exposed, a waiting army of engineers springs into action happily. Those programmers are motivated by the fact that their businesses are running this software: they want the quickest, most elegant fix possible.

As more companies find open source products to their liking, they are willing to donate money and developers to those projects. Several years ago, IBM invested heavily in a tool called Eclipse. From a business standpoint, it was cheaper to devote some cash and brainpower to an existing project than to reinvent the wheel in-house. While its improvements are available to everyone else – including competitors – IBM has a large say in the direction of development, insuring Eclipse will meet the company's future needs.

Current power players in the open source arena include Apple, Google, Firefox and Linux – an incredibly stable, Unix-type operating system.

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."