You blog purely out of passion. You absolutely love what you do, and if you are honest…writing is therapeutic. It’s your escape from the rapid-fire world that is your reality.
But, you have real talent and your readers know it.
They constantly check for what you’ve posted next. Reading your blog has now become a necessary part of their morning routine. Before they work.
That’s serious love.
With love comes “admiration”…
● Someone republishes your work and didn’t let you know. It popped up in your Google Alerts.
● Miraculously someone has blogged on the exact same topic with you and large chunks of their writing looks strangely familiar.
● That really cool infographic you created. Yep, it’s popping up all over the internet except the line that says www.mywebsite.com has unbelievably disappeared.
Here are three legal strategies for protecting your blog content:
1. Reprint statement. Include a reprint statement on your website telling your readers what they need to do in order to republish your writing.
For example, “Want to share this with the world? Go ahead. As long as you include my short bio available here [insert link] and include a link back to the original post.”
or,
“Want to repost? Email at copyright@nameofyourblog.com to request permission.”
2. Copyright Notice. Consider adding a copyright notice in your About the Author byline that shows at the end of each post. Folks rarely dig into the footer content and the more visible that you make the copyright notice the more difficult you make it for folks to “unknowingly” infringe on your work. The copyright notice contains three parts: (1) the year the work was published, (2) the name of the copyright owner and; (3) All Rights Reserved (meaning that you remain the copyright owner of the work).
Sample: © 2014 Jane Doe. All Rights Reserved.
3. Use a plug-in to protect your content. WordPress offers plug-ins that can attach information about the original source of the blog post and a back link. There are other plug-ins that can disable the right click and copy/paste function, the ability to drag and drop images, and the keyboard shortcuts to copy/paste. These functions will make it difficult for someone to swipe your work, and if they do…we know that they went through extreme measures to do so.
Check out:
WP Content Copy Protection
If you find that someone has stolen your work don’t sit on it. Check out my post on DMCA take down notices and get to work.
This post is a part of the iBlog legal series. Read the rest of the series here.