Copyright and blog scraping

On his blog, Shaun Low asks, “Do bloggers need a copyright page?.”

From a simple copyright perspective, the answer is no. As soon as any work is fixed in some tangible medium, the original expression in that work is protected by copyright law. As I am writing, I just saved what I had written before this sentence, so everything before this sentence is protected. When I post the article, everything in it will be covered by copyright.

Unfortunately, copyright infringement is so pervasive on the internet, it’s usually going to be difficult to do anything about it.

Content scrapers, though, usually indiscriminately scrape — steal — every bit of content from a post. Therefore, if one includes a copyright statement on every post — like you see at the end of this post — and that material appears elsewhere, it’s going to be a bit more obvious that it is stolen.

The copyright notice is another tweak to the blog. Thanks Shaun for a good question and post that made me think. Shaun’s blog is the newest addition to my growing blogroll of quality blogs.

August 11, 2007

dcr @ 12:49 am

It is difficult to do much about copyright infringement online, but every bit helps. TechFreak had another idea for fighting the scrapers in this post. The post also has links to other sites with various ideas on fighting content theft. I haven’t tried any of them yet. I’ve only used Google, as mentioned in a previous comment, and also Copyscape.

I use the Copyscrape graphic on some of my websites too, just to serve as an extra warning in addition to the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.

I should put the notice on my blog too…

Opal Tribble @ 6:38 am

I put the warning on my page and it’s on my RSS feed also. I constantly check to see if my information has been scraped. There are many people that really don’t think of it as stealing so a simple email does the trick but the ones that are difficult I’ll follow up with Google Spam. I haven’t had to go past that level yet.

August 12, 2007

dcr Blogs » Blog Archive » Are You Free? @ 3:23 pm

[…] you have to spend your time fighting content theft, how free are […]

August 20, 2007

The Spotlight Is On…. @ 4:06 pm

[…] writes many post that keep me coming back for more I thought I would point out two of his posts Copyright and Blog Scraping and Combating Internet […]

 


A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011


blogging, copyright, internet, internet ethics, Uncategorized

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