During this workshop, we'll explore how to "monetize" – to indulge in some vile jargon – blogs. AdSense plays a role in that, so we've decided to demo it: practicing what we preach... Earnings will go into source materials and the instructors' IPA (India Pale Ale) fund. Teaching, after all, is thirsty work.
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?
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.
Some scraper sites steal other people's material and pair it with Adsense listings – a huge no-no. Google takes action swiftly against Made for AdSense (MFA) blogs, which essentially are link farms. Because not only do these miscreants steal from creators, they spam the search engines...
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.
Copyscape notices. These deter some scroungers, but you can also search for duplicates of your pages at this site.
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.
Services like Tynt can detail copy activity on your site – and even automatically add a link back to your blog with every paste.
Forbid right-click captures with this code inside body tags.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Watch where you aim the camera – or rather, where you upload those memories of little Gertrude squeezing her Jabba the Hut doll. Even a photograph of a temporary art installation in Italy or Paraguay could land you in trouble. Yes, you pushed the shutter and thus own the copyright on the image. But make sure no one else holds rights on a creative work within it: then you need permission.
Before you panic, check out Wikimedia's great breakdown. Down the page, its casebook walks you through various scenarios, from sculptures to cave paintings and souvenir replicas of the Venus de Milo.
US law – and most first-world nations' – permits artists and photographers to sell representations of structures permanently in the public view. Egypt, however, recently tried to copyright the Sphinx and Giza's pyramids in a move that sparked much hilarity. Even the bill's author – Ashraf El Ashmawi, legal consultant to the antiquities council – finally admitted he wouldn't take the global witch-hunt to a micro level. "If you have a small shop and your trade is very limited, I will not take money from you," he told National Geographic.
"But if you are a big company, like some of these Chinese companies that make a lot of money from the replicas of antiquities ... according to the law, I can take the fees."
Thanks, fella. I'm glad to know blogger Marie Javins won't be extradited for posting her obligatory sightseeing snaps...
Some areas, like Peleliu (one of Palau's 16 states), may try to levy a commercial photography license on anyone associated with the media, however vaguely. On my last trip there, I was presented with a surprise $50 permit, instead of the usual $3 day-visitor one. I explained I wasn't shooting art for my Sport Diver article – or, indeed, any other at that rate. I offered to leave my cameras in the government office even. The bureaucrat insisted all journalists had to pay, but couldn't accept my credit card on site (the island's pretty rough and ready). Would I swing by the office in Koror?
Like hell.
(I did make a deal with Des, my local guide, that he would email me if his company might be fined for this, then I'd pay the tab. So far, so good.)
Anyway, as a blogger, you may wish to fly under the radar in some areas to avoid these hassles. An official on a five-square-mile state like Peleliu (pop 700) may not understand the nuances of "diary-style blog" versus, say, shooting stock for Getty.
Derivative works also stir up plenty of migraines among the geekerati. These are creations that include major, copyright-protected elements from another work.
Read here about a case lost by the artist Jeff Koons, who told artisans to transform a greeting card into four sculptures, which sold for $367,000. Unfortunately, he didn't gain permission from Photographer Art Rogers, who'd snapped the couple holding eight puppies.
So what does this mean for bloggers? Mainly be careful when compositing together illustrations – and vigilant when your material is thus remixed. Fair use allows you to write a Buffy the Vampire Slayer spoof and publish a collage of images ripped from newspapers, if you can find any these days ... The exemption also permits Google to run thumbnails of your images in its search engine, thanks to the Perfect 10 ruling. Judges deemed this "transformative because it provides an added benefit to the public, which was not previously available and might remain unavailable without the derivative or secondary use."
The most famous example of this is Marcel Duchamp's parody of the Mona Lisa. He added facial hair and the caption L.H.O.O.Q, also the work's title (it translates as "she has a hot tail"). He transformed a cult icon into an object of ridicule to critique the bourgeoisie.
For a something to be derivative and kosher, it must display originality of its own, containing sufficient new expression over and above the earlier work's. As Judge Pierre N. Leval noted in a landmark Harvard Law Review article: "Transformative uses may include criticizing the quoted work, exposing the character of the original author, proving a fact, or summarizing an idea argued in the original in order to defend or rebut it. They also may include parody, symbolism, aesthetic declarations, and innumerable other uses."
We'll talk more about piracy, copyright and protection week ten.
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."
"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."
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.
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.
Many writers, especially professional ones, balk at blogging and social-network updates. "I get paid to wordsmith," the logic runs. "Who will buy the cow if I give away the milk for free?"
First off, blogging can pay – and well. The genre's already produced millionaire-bloggers like Markus Frind, Kato Leonard, Jason Calacanis and others. Rafat Ali is another classic example. The laid-off dotcom reporter launched PaidContent, a newsletter about the business of online media. In 2002, his first year, he netted somewhere between $60-80,000, as this Wired News article explains. He later sold the site to ContentNext Media, a subset of the Guardian News and Media Ltd group, and still serves as editor in chief.
Ironically, Ali's subject is subject to intense debate right now. People are accustomed to free stuff over the innertubes. Subscription attempts – hiding material behind a paywall – tend to end badly. In 2007 The New York Times unlocked its archives; last year, so did much of The Wall Street Journal.
As Chris Anderson points out in Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, "Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411."
"Freeconomics," he calls this "race to the bottom".
(Embarrassingly, The Virginia Quarterly caught Anderson "borrowing" too liberally from Wikipedia. He claims this was a cut-and-paste error. Still, watch your sources: Don't be a slapdash author like him. As we've nagged before, Wikipedia is a great place to start research and a lousy place to end it. Also, don't be a pirate: t'isn't polite...)
Until ad revenue reaches sustainable levels online, the mainstream media's gonna panic and holler about all this. Here and here you can observe experts crunching numbers for different scenarios for newsrooms.
Angered by shrinking distributions and ad revenue, media mogul Rupert Murdoch might just take all his toys and go home. "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" he challenged his peers, before threatening to remove all News Corp. content from the search engine. As both Mashable and The Guardian Media pointed out, this quixotic announcement in November 2009 didn't make the intended big waves. The Independent gives a great breakdown of this drama and its possible end-game – saving newspapers – here. (We'll discuss pay models
and the future of media further throughout the class.)
“This is not about defining fair use,” said Sue Cross, executive vice president of the group. “There’s a bigger economic issue at stake here that we’re trying to tackle.”
One goal of the AP and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work of news organization.
Europe's ahead of the US on the protection front, but one thing's certain: regardless of geography, hard news from reliable sources remains a key ingredient in cyberspace. The AP's just moving aggressively to protect its interests, which could be a good thing, however initially aggravating.
Much as the blogosphere wants to be bleeding-edge, it lags 2.5 hours behind the main-stream media (MSM) still. And studies show that only 3.5% of blog story lines become headlines. But, as The New York Times points out: "Though the blogosphere as a whole lags behind, a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web, led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo."
For now, no absolute formulas exist for making money online. Heck, YouTube stood to lose $470 million in 2009, despite dominating the online-video market (luckily it's part of the Google family, which can take a hit like that. See the mothership's rebuttal of "hideous loss" predictions...). And microblogging wunderkind Twitter isn't even sure how to bring in the seriously big bucks, though the company's on its way. The site's grown so popular that people are offering up $250,000 for as-yet-unavailable “spotlighted” accounts. Celebrities like 50 Cent and Britney Spears have hired ghostwriters to pen their 140-word tweets, according to The
New York Times. Surely someone will cash in on all this sturm und drang soon.
Enrolled students can access the calendar and bulletin boards here. Log-in required.
About this site
Taught by a professional writer and a retired Microsoft programmer, the Blogging Frontier is a Writers.com online workshop that focuses on the art and the craft of new media. Instructors Amanda Castleman and Mike Keran guide students through the basics of setting up a blog and explain terminology. The course then launches into more advanced topics such as earning money, search engine optimization, and working with images and multimedia.
Weekly feedback includes writing critiques and technical ones, setting this ten-week course apart from similar offerings. Dates for 2010: April 21, July 28, October 27. Late-enrollment open until day ten, space permitting.
For a more in-depth answer, search on "word + Wikipedia". The site contains extensive entries on tech subjects. Since the content's user-generated, journalists and academics consider it the "best place to start and the worst place to stop" research-wise. But to solve a quick jargon panic, Wikipedia is your friend...
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