Do bloggers need a copyright page?
Aug. 9th, 2007 by ShaunI like to check my Technorati stats every once and a while, (ok ok maybe everyday lol), and I normally like to visit any site that linked to me and give my appreciation. Well the other day I received a link from a suspicious site so I decided to check it out. It turns out it wasn’t even a real link from that site. It was one of my posts copied exactly word for word and the link came within the post from my own internal linking.
Well I wasn’t too pleased about this for a number of reasons: I will be tagged for duplicate content by Google. Duplicate content greatly affects your search engine ranking and will have a negative impact on this blog. My content was basically stolen without any form of permission and no credit to my site.
I have no experience with plagiarism and I really had no idea how to handle the situation, so I decided to do a little bit a research to see what can be done with this matter. After reading a few sites and blogs it really seemed like there was not too much I could do unless I wanted to pursue legal matters, (definitely not worth the time and money). It appeared I was basically shit outa luck until I found an interesting post on Smart Wealthy Rich. The author, Jonathan Phillips, had this happen to him back in July where someone had completely stolen an article from him and he made an excellent post on dealing with plagiarism.
How did Smart Wealthy Rich handle the situation?
Like I said there is no internet police you can report this to and basically nobody is willing to help you except you! You must act professionally and get this matter resolved on your own if you want something done.
- - Jonathan’s first reaction was to contact the blog owner via e-mail. The e-mail was basically a formal request to remove the post or modify the post to correctly give credit to Smart Wealthy Rich. He gave the site 48 hours to respond and did not get any answer.
- - Since the e-mail approach didn’t exactly work out in his favor he decided to take the next step of action and that was to contact the advertisers on the site that had stolen the article from Smart Wealthy Rich. The site had banners and text links so Jonathan followed the ads and contacted the advertisers. He let them know that the site they were advertising on was stealing content and they were basically doing business with a thief. Within 24 hours he got responses from all of the advertisers. All of the advertisers said they would stop doing business with the blog owner.
The idea behind the story is to act professionaly. Don’t e-mail the blog owner threatening legal actions and do NOT use profanity. Deal with the situation like an adult, do some reasearch to see what can be done and most of all be polite. You can monitor your content on your site using Copyscape which lets you search the web for copies of your content.
I just briefly touched on some of the things you can do to handle plagiarism but there are many other approaches to the situation that I didn’t cover. Check out Jonathan’s full post here for more details on the matter.
I have already e-mailed the blog owner asking for the removal of the post that was copied from my site. Somehow I don’t think that will get the job done. Unfortunately the blog that stole my information only runs Google Adsense on his blog and no other advertisements therefor I can’t go directly to his advertisers. I am not too worried about this situation and I don’t think that it will affect my search engine rankings very much either. I just wanted to share some ideas on how to deal with plagiarism.
Over the next little while here I will be working on a copyright page of my own in attempts to prevent this issue from happening again. You can check out Smart Wealthy Rich’s copyright page here for some ideas. Notice how I gave full credit to SWR and linked to his site several times. I didn’t want to piss him off or lose any of my advertisers 
. Make sure you always give credit when it is deserved.
Do you guys think a copyright page is necessary for blogs? Do you guys have any suggestions on what I can do with this matter? Please share your ideas with us all I would love to hear from you!
About The Author
Posted in: Ramblings, The Net |
If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed.
August 9th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Sadly this kind of thing happens to thousands of blog owners. Providing you have more authority than the spam site which wont be difficult you will get the credit for the content
August 9th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
yeh hopefully this is the case for me lol
August 9th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Well, I think that copyright is a must for every blogger. No one likes his/her content getting copied.
I’m going to make one of my own. This post has inspired me to make one
Thanks for posting!
August 9th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I like to use some or part of other posts, but I make sure I link back to the post or the blog. Only an idiot would take credit for someone elses work.
August 9th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
[...] next commentator would be Shaun Low. Shaun Low asks whether or not a copyright page is necessary, and talks about displaying feed [...]
August 9th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
If he’s running Google AdSense, contact Google. You may have to file a DMCA complaint with Google. I don’t know for sure, but something like that might get him banned from AdSense.
August 10th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Your material is already copyrighted whether you have a copyright page or statement. The material provided by your commenters is also copyrighted - and the copyright belongs to them!
A copyright page is NOT necessary. A copyright statement is not required.
Copyright exists in a work from the moment that it is fixed in some tangible medium.
What that means is that as I am writing this comment, it is not copyrighted because if my computer were to lose power, these words would be gone. However, when I hit the “add comment” button below, the words will be saved on a server somewhere. Copyright for this “original expression” of words begins at that moment.
That being said, there is probably some value in having a copyright statement somewhere on the blog - maybe even on every post. That way if someone scrapes the conrtent, the copyright statement will go with it.
Interesting….
August 10th, 2007 at 2:19 am
[...] On his blog, Shaun Low asks, “Do bloggers need a copyright page?.” [...]
August 10th, 2007 at 3:20 am
Hi shaun, its been sometime since i last visit your site and i was blogging on John chow’s look a like, then i remember of your blog, LOL, anyway i had you tagged in to my latest post on JC!
August 10th, 2007 at 10:33 am
@ etienne: lol thanx appreciate the link
@Mike Goad: thanks for the information it seems your far more knowledgeable abou this top than I am. I also read your post that you made about copyright infringement that you just recently published.
@dcr: thanks I have been looking into this I will contact google asap.
@erik: yeh i don’t think theres much anyone can do to prevent it, i still think a copyright page might stop some thieves but who knows it’s worth a shot.
@steven: thanks i will contact them
August 10th, 2007 at 4:30 am
That’s unfortunate that this has happened to you, although I’ve read it happening to bloggers before.
You mentioned that the person is only using Google adsense, you can still report him to Google and perhaps get him banned.
Hope everything works out ok.
August 10th, 2007 at 8:26 am
I don’t think a copyright page would stop the sort of person who would steal content in the first place. You just have to do your best in keeping an eye out for your content on other blogs.
August 10th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Hi Shaun! Thanx a lot for the mentions and linkage, really appreciate it
Your post is a perfect example of “building upon someone’s work”, it’s great, that is the way to go. Linking back, quoting, all good practices. I highly encourage everyone to have a copyright page.
One thing regarding adsense, you can file a DMCA complaint, but the problem is you can wait weeks/months before you get a reply from Google, contacting “smaller” advertisers is a good alternative (worked really well for me).
One thing that is often misunderstood is “fair use” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use ) just gotta make sure you understand that before taking any actions, like filing a DMCA or contacting advertisers or hosting company.
August 11th, 2007 at 1:33 am
thanks jon! I will try this out hopefully I get some reaction.