Why it is important to Protect your Blog Content from Copyright Infringement
Original blog content is one’s valuable intellectual property. One has the right to protect content from being stolen. While, writing is personal creation of one’s own ideas and thoughts about any particular topic, businesses have blogs on their websites to publish content promoting their businesses. Such blogs are written by businesses themselves. So, a blog must be protected as it will reduce the risk of being copied.
The blogs are created by bloggers after hours of research and hard work. Each piece of work(blog content) is the sole property of the creator and having it stolen can have repercussions. If one discovers that one’s work has been stolen and used somewhere else, without one’s consent, one may want to take a legal action. Therefore, it is important to protect the original content of the blog from copyright infringement. Now the question is how to protect the blog content. Let’s understand that how to copyright a blog and legally safeguard your blog content from copyright infringement.
What is a Copyright?
A copyright is an exclusive legal right given to the original creator of the work to further reproduce and duplicate the work. A copyright is registered for original work created by the author, it could be writing in the form of a book, poem, essay, movie, or article, podcasts, photos, website contents, art works, music, sound recording, architectural designs, softwares or audio. Copyright law does not protect mere ideas, concepts, theories, slogans, domain names and titles; it has to be in physical or tangible form.
How to register for Copyright?
Copyright law allows the author or creator of work to file an online application along with all required documents and filling in all the particulars like details of the author of the copyright, description of copyright work, details of publisher, place etc.
The Copyright Office examines all documents and other particulars of the application and if no objection is found, then it grants the copyright to the owner. In case any objection is found regarding granting the copyright, then the Copyright Office issue notice to the applicant and in the form of examination report for the same. Once the examination report is appropriately responded to, the copyright is registered. However, there are several rules and guidelines related to registration of copyright which one must follow.
Bloggers can have copyright for whole website as well as copyright their blog only. The main idea to get the copyright is to protect the content of the published posts. It is also possible that a blogger can upload additional posts published after the registration date or can upload either monthly or yearly. Or, one can register most valuable or important posts and content. It means that one has to file new application every time one wants to get your content copyrighted.
What Is “Fair Use” in content?
Another thing to understand is the meaning of Fair Use. It means if one is using another author’s work or content, but for a transformative purpose. The Fair Use doctrine allows copying of the content, but in limited circumstances. It should be put to fair use which includes non-commercial or non-profit use i.e. purpose of the use.
The nature of the content also amounts to fair use. Amount of content used and its impact on original work amounts to fair use of the content. Fair Use is not a straight forward solution to escape from copyright infringement, but the doctrine tries to balance the rights of copyright owner with the interests of society.
What to do if one’s content is stolen?
Copying and using someone else’s blog content in your name is a crime. You can protect your work from it and can take further legal action on it. Apart from legal actions, you can always have some other approaches to protect your website content being copied. Like adding a copyright notice on your site, adding terms of using content on your website, adding watermark on the original images, and by making it impossible with the help of tools or plugins to copy the content of your website.
Read Related Article: https://thepostingtree.com/key-reasons-why-should-you-hire-a-criminal-defense-attorney/
