Is My Blog Content Copyrighted? Can It Be Stolen?
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Question: I am new to blogging and I would like to know if blogs are copyrighted or is anything I post up for grabs?
The cold, hard truth about the Internet is that ANYTHING you post can probably be ripped off from you. It’s the nature of putting content out there, if it’s valuable, then at some point some scammer is going to steal it and either reuse it for their own purposes (like a splog, which is a “spam blog”) or some other way.
So, the answer is yes, your content can be stolen. Never put anything online in your blog that you can’t afford to have stolen. That being said, you have to stop worrying about people stealing your content if you want to be successful.
Having your content stolen is part of the “cost of doing business” on the Internet. It happens. If it does, there are things you can do though. Here’s one of them.
If someone rips off your content and is reposting it as their own on their blog without attributing it to you, you can, and should, contact that person if possible and ask them to stop. If they don’t, contact their ISP (do a whois.net lookup) and find out who their host is and contact them and tell them one of their users is stealing your content. More often than not they will shut down that person’s blog or website.
March 13th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Hi Jim,
Thanks for your reply, you actually gave me an answer to my first problem. What prompted me to ask the question is from a website I found that has literally taken most of my websites program content and put it on theirs. I did phone and email this person, now thanks to you I have the next step. I was under the impression when you have your website copy rited you where protected, but I didn’t think that applied to a blog. I am a pioneer in my field and I have seen other websites use some of my content, and I have no problem with it, but not to the extreme of this one website.
Warm Regards,
Margarit Brigham
March 13th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
What does “your comment is awaiting moderation mean?”
March 23rd, 2008 at 3:19 am
It means your comment requires the author’s approval. :)
I think to prevent splog, you can copyright your content with Creative Common and put some internal links in the posts (so that when they steal the content there will link back from their site).
April 14th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I think that we all should understand that newbies are so excited to be on the net that we don;t realize that there are many people also out there that can’t wait for new material to steal. Be careful online as you would with anything else you own.
http://www.myworkathomedaddy.com
April 14th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Good data to have. I didn’t know about the choices for followup so thanks.
robertgisel.com