Earn Over the Web

Well, upon logging into WordPress yesterday, I saw a new incoming link. As I had never heard of the site, I curiously clicked on it, it brought me to this page: http://shock-go-latte.blogspot.com . I was surprised and horrified to discover that someone had copied and pasted some of my latest posts, plaintext and word for word, into the blog. They didn’t even bother to edit out the parts referring to “Earn Over the Web.” There is no reference citing myself or this blog as the author of any of the articles, and I received no request nor any form of contact stating that the author, Nobuts, desired to use the writing.

All of the articles on this blog are written from scratch and take effort and time on my part. For someone to steal the writing which has had a lot of work put into it brings dismay. It also brings up the question of copyrighting content within the blogosphere. Is a blatant verbatim like the above blog legally okay, since this blog is not officially copyrighted? Within my footer it declares content as property of EarnOverTheWeb, this should suffice to tell people that EarnOverTheWeb is not just some article farm. A copyright for web content can cost upwards of $30, which is a lot for a startup blog like this one.

If anyone knows more about the regulations surrounding intellectual property such as blog content, or has any suggestions for what I can do, please leave a comment. Also, you can help to stop this person from stealing my writing by flagging the blog located at www.shock-go-latte.blogspot.com

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Update: I have been told by a friend:

It appears that you should own the copyright to all works on your blog, including any text, images, design, code, etc, EVEN IF you don’t have a copyright symbol on the page. It’s better of course to mark it with a copyright symbol and the year, I.E. Copyright (c) Tim Johnstone, 2007. Google “copyright laws” or something and you’ll see a myriad of pages about this. It appears that you are in the right and they are in the wrong. What you’re talking about with $30 is registering your copyright, which has advantages, but it not necessary to have the copyright. Patents you have to register and such, but copyrights no. It’s yours.

Now I have to consider what actions to take to get this user to remove the infringing content.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Personal/This Blog, Blogging Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.