Protect yourself and your work. With blogging and copyrights, there are two main areas to be concerned.
- Protecting your work and ideas
- Protecting others’ work and ideas
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. Go see one if you have deeper concerns about intellectual property.
Blog copyrighting: Protecting your work
You’ve taken the time to put your ideas on your website and are very proud of what you’ve shared. You syndicate your content through RSS so other can read it. Here’s what you need to know…
There are aggregators and utilities that take can take your RSS feed (your blog content) and place them on websites. This is great, but you want to be sure that you get the credit you deserve. If you syndicate only excerpts, you probably don’t have to worry about this. If you syndicate your complete posts, then be sure to tweak your feed template so that your copyright and/or usage guidelines are included. This way it will always be clear that you are the author. You can include links to your website and other contact information if you want to be easily contacted.
If you use WordPress, you can use a great plugin from Taragana that automatically inserts copyright info.
Crediting Syndicated Content: Playing Nice with Others
My life lesson
I decided I would setup a personal online feed reader so I could keep up to date on technology. The domain I used had zero traffic. No ads… nothing. Well, apparently it wasn’t very personal. Blog Herald and a few others got wind of it and I was tarred and feathered. I was accused of splogging—copy-n-pasting content for the purpose of making money.
My intentions were innocent, but many thought it was wrong. Out of integrity, I stopped using it as a feed reader and dropped the site right away.
How did it happen?
The program that I used grabbed complete posts through RSS. And although it included appropriate citations and source links, the template I used kept the links at the bottom where many didn’t venture to.
How to prevent it?
The easiest thing you can do is not syndicate content. From a search engine ranking standpoint, it’s probably much better to avoid it completely. If you have a good use for syndicating content on your site, be sure that the software (and template) you use gives appropriate citations near the beginning of the article. A proper citation should include, at least, the author’s name and a link back to their site. The most effective thing you can do is simply write your own content and link to the other person’s website. I’m sure the link back would be appreciated.
Peaceful syndication
Mainly everything comes down to common sense and a little bit of paranoia. Keep mindful of others and ask when you don’t know.
Do you have an experience to share? Are there times that syndicating another’s content is beneficial? Comment below.
