My fiancee is a very talented poet. You can check out her work and see for yourself. Last week, on a whim, she Googled some of her work. What she found was alarming. The second hit on Google was a Tumblr page, created by a member of one of the online poetry forums where she posts. This member had stolen at least 19 of my fiancee’s poems and was presenting them as her own work.
When we had a closer look at the blog, we saw that the blogger had been stealing work from at least 10 poets on the same forum and posting them all as her own work – literally hundreds of poems. No doubt this blogger was too young to fully comprehend the egregious legal and moral blunders she was commiting. Several poems had been reblogged on popular poetry blogs, and she had acquired a substantial following for other poets’ work.
This is a case where the damage outweighs benefits of content sharing on the internet. The recognition those poems received should have gone to those who earned it. My fiancee organized an effort to have the content removed immediately. The next time she checked her email, that blogger probably had a heart attack – dozens of emails from angry writers, threatening to ruin her reputation or take legal action. She was clearly getting more than she had bargained for, and when we checked the next day, the blog was gone.
Intellectual Property
In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, it’s important to remember that copyright and intellectual property rights remain important even as information becomes easier to share and harder to control. If you want to be recognized for your work, it’s best to be vigilant and take precautions. Nobody has the time or money to treat online content the same as print. Registering a copyright for everything you publish on the web simply isn’t realistic. But that doesn’t mean you just have to grin and bear it if someone tries to steal your work.
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Your creative work is your property. If you care about what happens to that property, then you’re going to have to police it, because nobody else out there is doing it for you. Copyright laws work, but they usually only come into effect if the holder of the copyright takes action. Here are a few questions you might want to ask yourself before posting content online:
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How much is it worth to post this content? If it’s a piece of writing that you hope to publish one day, you might want to think twice about posting it somewhere just for exposure and feedback. Web content usually stands very little chance of being picked up by a publisher. On the other hand, there are many benefits to writing for the web. You can make money directly off of web publishing, or you can attract a following that leads to profits.
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How much time are you willing invest in policing this content to make sure it hasn’t been stolen by other web publishers? If it’s good content and it’s readily available, chances are someone is going to try stealing it at some point. Weigh the benefits of posting this content against the amount of time you’re going to have to spend guarding it, and decide if it’s worth it for you.
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Where is a good place to post this content? If you’re posting content on a site regularly, are you sure that you’re retaining the copyright? How well do you know and trust the publishers of this site, and how familiar are you with the site’s content policies? Are you comfortable with the license you grant to the site owners by posting your content there?
Once you become and experienced web publisher, you’ll get a sense of where to post what type of content, and what kind of policing you’ll have to do. Just remember that if it’s out there on the web, others can see it. Even on a members-only writing forum, the work you post isn’t completely secure.
When Copyright Starts
Copyright starts as soon as you create something in a tangible and fixed form. Traditionally, this means words on paper that you can show to somebody and say, “Look! I wrote this, not that guy!” Technology has evolved to the point that content doesn’t always take this same form, but it’s not a bad idea to have some kind of physical backup of anything you put on the web. You don’t have to print everything out on paper. When you save a file on your computer the date it was saved is recorded in the file properties, which counts as a copyright in its most basic form. Back these files up and keep multiple copies of them.
You can take this kind of basic copyright further, and apply the “poor-man’s copyright” method to your digital work. Every few months or so, save your content files on a data disc and put it in a self-addressed stamped envelope. A sealed envelope, dated by the post office and containing your content, can serve as a valuable document in a case that gets pushed to a copyright dispute. If you want to preserve the rights to syndicate and distribute your content in some form, the poor man’s copyright might be worth the effort.
When you post content on the web, you can include copyright information on that work even if the copyright isn’t registered. The same applies to trademarks. What a common law treatment of the trademark (TM) symbol means is, “I haven’t registered this as a trademark, but I’m treating it as one.” This can carry weight in intellectual property disputes. By including copyright information in your signatures on forums, your blog posts, and anywhere on the web you post content, you’re effectively demonstrating that you police that content. Branding your work with a common law trademark can heighten the effectiveness and demonstrate consistency to your audience.
Finally, if a work is extremely important to you, then you should always register an official copyright on it. In addition, when it comes to works that could bring you residual monetary gain, or that are more central to your profile as a creative personality, you also should look into registering it as an official copyright. In Canada, contact the Canadian Intellectual Property Office to find out what you need to do. Copyright fees are $50.00 or slightly more, depending.
After Publishing
After you post your content on the web, how do you know if someone is plagiarizing you? The only real answer is that you have to be as vigilant as seems appropriate. One method is to type large samples of your text (30 words or more) into Google. The chances are slim that any widely distributed content will escape the eyes of Google using this method. If your blog is constantly syndicating content, though, this can take a lot of time. One of the best resources available for you is a site called Copyscape.
Copyscape allows you to enter any URL and check if the content of that site has been copied throughout the web. The site allows limited use to anyone, as well as some advanced features for those who wish to subscribe. They also allow anyone to post a banner to inform web users that any content is “protected by copyscape.” Whether this provides any meaningful protection is debatable, but it is certainly a nice option to have.
There are many venues in which you can publish work online. A lot of talented writers participate in writing forums and similar online communities without suspecting that anyone would steal their work. If your work is online anyway, it’s worthwhile to collect it all together and post it on a blog on a free hosting platfrom like Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, or Posterous.
If your work is up on the web and all gathered together in one place and especially if you are attracting followers, it is unlikely you will have to worry about legal disputes in the area of copyright infringement. A blog acts as a public record of your work, and most blogs automatically date your work and put a copyright symbol on it. If someone does steal your work, your ownership of that work will not be in question. In most cases all you will have to do will be tell the thief that you want them to remove your work or credit you for it as the case may be.
How To Respond To Theft
Even after taking all of these precautions, it’s still possible that someone will steal your content. If it’s good work and it’s out there for everyone to see, then eventually someone is going to try taking it. The importance of quality in web content is becoming more and more widely recognized, but the volume of content needed to compete in internet markets is ever increasing. In this environment, the temptation to steal from others to fill your content needs is tremendous.
If you find someone has stolen your content, the first thing to do is to ask yourself what may have motivated the theft. When my fiancee’s content was stolen, it wasn’t because the blogger had hoped to make money from the theft. She probably just wanted some attention and validation. In a case such as this, it is unlikely that the theif would force you to enter a legal dispute over copyright or intellectual property. All it took was a few people to confront her about the infraction and she knew the jig was up.
The first thing to do when you notice your content has been stolen, is to send a brief and calm but strongly worded email. If you can somehow get ahold of the thief’s email address then that is ideal. If not, then contact the publisher of the site, the blogging platform, or anyone else responsible for putting that content on the web. In your email, politely but firmly assert that you possess a copyright on the work in question, and you expect to see it removed immediately. Most of the time, you will see the content taken down within a day or two.
If you don’t get a reply, there are still a few things you can try before taking legal action. For example, you can make it known to the site’s audience that they are stealing content. Reblog on Tumblr, or contact the site’s followers on Twitter and Facebook, offering a link back to your original material. As soon as you show that you are willing to confront their following, thieves will likely comply with your request rather than risk damage to their reputation. You have to be careful when taking this kind of approch, though. Make sure that you’re careful about what you say. Anything you post on the web reflects on your reputation, so act accordingly.
As long as you’re smart about it, you can get most people to stop taking credit for your work by this point. If the problem persists, you might want to look into sending a DMCA notice or a formal cease and desist letter. If possible, you should sit down with a lawyer and talk about this process. The laws exist to protect your copyrights, but you have to utilize them properly, and it takes someone with the right legal knowledge to do this effectively.
Protecting your content is a substantial amount of time and effort. You might have been lucky enough to find that your content has remained largely under your control. If you’re constantly publishing to the web, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes credit for your work. It’s worth your time to be prepared for that eventuality.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
