2 Reasons Copyright Notices Now Protect My Hard Work

Copyright infringement is a problem that every blogger will face, at one time or another. Plagiarism and spam are the issues most of us talk about when we discuss abuse, especially on a writing site like LiteracyBase. But by far the bigger issue is copyright infringement. There is also a related concern over having content on sites where we are unable to delete it should we want to.

Copyright Infringement vs. Plagiarism

The reason copyright infringement is a bigger concern than spam or plagiarism, case by case, is that each time somebody uses your content without consent there is a potential for you to lose income and for your reputation to be damaged.

Each and every case of copyright infringement is a theft – even if the guilty party gives you credit and links to your original text.

Why? Because they stole something intangible: your control over how your content is used and distributed. It’s only plagiarism if someone claims your work as their own; the infringer will sometimes leave your name right on the illegal copy. That eliminates the question of plagiarism entirely. Still, every single unlicensed use of your work is copyright infringement.

Here’s why it matters:

• When people read your content on its original site, you get the web traffic. You and the publishing site gain influence, and can also exploit the work for things like ad revenue.
• If people are reading your content on someone else’s site, it’s the other site that gains both the traffic and the influence.
• If the owners of the infringing site are earning money through ads placed on an illegal copy of your post, the thief is turning a profit on your hard work – money that you should be earning instead! Talk about adding insult to injury . . .

This is why I have recently gone back to adding copyright notices within the body of my articles and posts. I don’t expect it to do much in the way of preventing a thief from stealing my content and using it without permission. But I do hope that the notice will help me to prove ownership of my posts, should I ever need to prove it objectively. Read on to find out why this has been a problem in the past.

The Problem of Infringement After the Original Site Goes Offline

Some of you may know that I got my start with paid web writing on a site called Associated Content (AC,) which was later bought out by Yahoo. Over the course of several years, I published articles every single day – sometimes several in a day. A few of the articles were work for hire, but I owned full rights for most of what I published there. So I had a great deal of content that I wanted to republish after Yahoo closed the site that had once been AC.

The problem is, at some point along the way a couple of scraper blogs started stealing content from AC. And at the time, I didn’t know it. I only discovered it after Yahoo closed the site down, erasing pretty much all evidence of my articles having been published there originally.

Years later, when I decided that I wanted to republish some of my recipes to my own blog, I checked to be sure there were no copies still indexed on Google. That’s when I discovered the first of my articles that had been stolen by a site – a scraper blog that uses bots to steal content from other sites and then to automatically publish those articles on a monetized blog.

Sending a DMCA Takedown Notice

As I’ve gone through the process of tracking down the people responsible for this blog, I’ve also learned that it isn’t just one or two of my articles they stole. There are at least a half-dozen of my own articles on that site. And from the looks of it, they stole the writing of others from AC as well.

Now when I want to send a DMCA takedown notice to the web host for this illegal site, I have no proof of my original publication to send with the notice. Because my original texts were removed when AC was shut down.

Had I included my copyright notice in the text of those articles, that proof might still be built right into the illegal copies today, and I could probably get the whole site shut down.

Most scrapers include the entire content when they steal an article – basically, everything that comes up in the RSS feed or that is detected as the body text of a page. Sometimes you’ll even see the images getting scraped too. Scraped copies retain original links to related content on the site of origin, and sometimes even an author byline or bio if it appeared in the body of the text.

Adding a copyright notice that includes a mention of the author and the site where the content was published, and including links to the site or the author’s contact info, could add weight to an infringement claim even if the original copies no longer exist.

The Problem of Content the Author Cannot Remove

When you publish your articles or posts on a writing site that is controlled by a third person, there’s always a chance that at some point you’ll want to remove your content and not be able to. There have been numerous cases where writers who published on sites like Bubblews, Bukisa, Squidoo, Seekyt, and Seraphic Insights claim the site owners have locked them out of their accounts or prevented them from deleting their posts.

While a copyright notice isn’t quite as handy in this situation, it could help establish your authorship in a case where the site owner attempts to remove the author byline and claim ownership of your content. Embedded references to your other work, links to your social media contacts or personal blog, and personal photos included in the body of a post are also tools you can use to foil attempts at hijacking your content.

Do you add copyright notices to your posts on sites like LiteracyBase? I’d love to hear why or why not!

Original content © 2016 Kyla Matton Osborne

This article was published on LiteracyBase. If you are reading this content anywhere else, it has probably been stolen. Please report it to me so I can address any copyright infringements. Thank you!

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