Blogging Protection and Copyright

September 15, 2007 10:36 AM

My blog is beginning to be somewhat successful, and after finding my content in various places without attribution I'm a little nervous. I'm using Wordpress, hosted somewhere else... What sort of steps should I be taking to protect my content? I've certainly no problem with people quoting a bit, etc. but I take a dim view of someone reposting an entire article with new ads, etc. I'm aware that a lot of sites simply steal and make use of your feeds - anyway to stop that short of not having full feeds? Also, what sort of copyright notice should I be employing that both protects me and separates me from any comments people may make? Thanks!
posted by Gideon to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

When I find this (which pretty often, unfortunately), I do a WHOIS lookup on the offending domain and send the owner a polite email asking for my copyrighted content to be removed. I'll also CC the abuse@ email address of the webhost that the domain is hosted with. This has worked 95% of the time, because these scumbags don't want lawsuits, so they'll just remove my feed and replace it with some other one. YMMV.
posted by nitsuj at 10:46 AM on September 15, 2007

Best answer: "Name of blog" entries & attributed commentary (C) 2007- (your name), (all | some) rights reserved. Comments (C) 2007- by their individual authors, and do not reflect or express the opinion or position of "Name of blog."

As for the other, you can report them to their ISP or host, and request for infringing material to be removed, but there's not much you can do before the fact. Disabling copy+paste and other CTRL commands, mouse button commands, etc., are easily circumvented, and they tick people off.
posted by headspace at 10:53 AM on September 15, 2007

DMCA takedown notices to the offending sites' ISPs. They're cheap, they're boilerplate, and they're generally pretty effective.

It may be a shitty law, but you might as well make it work for you.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:54 AM on September 15, 2007

You could state in your sidebar and in your "about" page that all your content is under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license, which will allow you to go after any site (as nitsuj said) that uses your content and has too many ads for your taste.

You could also state that the license covers only your content and that all comments belong to their author.
posted by bru at 10:59 AM on September 15, 2007

If someone seems to be automatically reposting your content, usually it'll be via a script running on their web server, so if you block its IP from accessing your server then that'll usually prevent further abuse. The WordPress site has an article covering IP blocking.
posted by malevolent at 10:59 AM on September 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Also, if contacting the site owner and the host doesn't help, you can alert the advertisers, if any, that run ads on the offending site, and they will usually drop it.
posted by phoenixy at 5:36 PM on September 15, 2007

I would just like to say that consider the default copyright has much more protection than a Creative Commons license. Even though I helped build the CC org and site, I wouldn't suggest adding a license to be more explicit that you don't want your site mirrored and covered in ads -- your default copyright already does that and much more.
posted by mathowie at 10:05 PM on September 15, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I'm going with a standard copyright claim and I'll go from there.

The creative commons interests me, but I need to know a bit more about it before doing anything with it. I'm certainly not adverse to the standard give and take of blogging, and don't mind sites making money off a portion of my work - in a fair use sort of way.

Thanks!
posted by Gideon at 1:04 AM on September 16, 2007