How to Create Consistently Great Content for the Long Haul – Developing better creative habits is one of the most valuable things you can do as a content creator. Legendary Choreographer Twyla Tharp’s practical book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, is a ground-breaking guide to becoming a calmer, better balanced, more productive creative professional. Continue reading
The Pinterest Updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Privacy Policy will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012. Noteworthy changes include: Continue reading
On Monday, February 20th The Official Pinterest blog entry was focused on copyright. Web sites are now able to opt-out of having their images pinned by Pinterest’s users by inserting code into their headers. (It works much the same way robots.txt does in keeping search engine spiders from crawling your site.) Continue reading
Along with blogging comes responsibility and ignorance of the law is no excuse. Copyrightable works include but are not limited to literary works such as articles, blog posts, stories, journals, or computer programs, pictures and graphics, as well as audio and video recordings. Copyrights do not need not be applied for as they are vested in the creators of intellectual property. When we create something — we own the copyright, which is our exclusive right as the creator to control who else can use our work and in what manner. *
The Berne Convention (for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works) was established in 1886 and is an international agreement that governs copyright. The Berne Convention requires its signatories to recognize the copyright of works of authors from other signatory countries (known as members of the Berne Union) in the same way as it recognizes the copyright of its own nationals.
In the United States, the Library of Congress officially registers copyrights which now last for the life of the author plus 70 years.
Thanks to organizations like Creative Commons, licenses like the GNU Free Documentation License, and the public domain, there are many images, songs, movies and documents freely available for you to download and republish without fear of violating copyright.
Public domain definition: The public domain is generally defined as consisting of works that are either ineligible for copyright protection or with expired copyrights. Public domain refers to the total absence of copyright protection for work The public domain is a range of abstract materials commonly referred to as intellectual property which are not owned or controlled by anyone. The term indicates that these materials are therefore “public property”, and available for anyone to use for any purpose.
Once in the public domain, it is always in the public domain. However, any variation on any public domain work becomes the property of the person making the variation, and it receives an automatic copyright, just as do completely original works.
When Copyright Protection Becomes Public Domain
The data below will let you know when you can safely use a piece of art or music without permission because it is now in public domain after copyright protection expiration, or how long the copyright protection will last.
| Published before 1923 – now in public domain. |
Published from 1923 to 1963 – When published with a copyright notice © or “Copyright [dates] by [author/owner]” – copyright protection lasts 28 years and could be renewed for an additional 67 years for a total of 95 years. If not renewed, now in public domain. | Published from 1923 to 1963 – When published with no notice – now in public domain. | Published from 1964 to 1977 – When published with notice – copyright protection lasts 28 years for first term; automatic extension of 67 years for second term for a total of 95 years. |
| Created before 1/1/1978 but not published – copyright notice is irrelevant – copyright protection lasts for the life of author and 70 years or 12/31/2002, whichever is greater. | Created before 1/1/1978 and published between 1/1/1978 and 12/31/2002 – notice is irrelevant – copyright protection lasts the life of author and 70 years or 12/31/2047, whichever is greater. | Created 1/1/1978 or after – When work is fixed in tangible medium of expression – notice is irrelevant – copyright protection lasts for the life of author and 70 years based on the longest living author if jointly created or if work of corporate authorship, works for hire, or anonymous and pseudonymous works, the shorter of 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation. |
* Reblogging and WordPress.com Terms of Service: “By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog.”
I have listed many free sources of images on my Resources page and my list is by no means complete. Do you have favorite sources of free images, songs, movies and documents you would like to share? If so please comment so I can include your sources on my Resources page as well.
Related posts found in this blog:
Copyright basics for bloggers
How to copyright your digital works
Content theft: The come and get it solution
Splog Off! Dealing with content theft
SplogSpot: Dealing with content thieves
Copyright: Fair Use Limitations
What is copyright?
If you aren’t into having a virtual Second Life then you most likely have not heard of Ozimals or Amaretto Ranch Breedables. The former make and sell breedable virtual bunnies. The latter are newcomers who make and sell virtual horses. Well, the two have wound up in the courts over a copyright dispute.
The concept of raising artificial creatures in a video game originated with Puppy Love by Tom Snyder Productions, released for Macintosh in 1986. Digital pets were a massive fad in Japan, and to a lesser extent in the United States and United Kingdom during the late 1990s. The popularity of virtual pets in the United States, and the constant need for attention the pets required, led to them being banned from schools across the country, a move that hastened the virtual pet’s decline from popularity. wikipedia
Here’s a copy of the Amaretto complaint document (PDF). On 21 Dec 2010 Judge Charles R. Breyer of the United States District Court for Northern California issued a temporary restraining order to Linden Lab (PDF) and “all persons in active concert or participation with Linden Research” from filing DMCA notices against Amaretto or otherwise removing its content from Second Life.
“The gist of the copyright dispute between the parties is whether Plaintiff’s virtual horses infringe on copyrights associated with Defendant’s virtual bunnies.” This reminded me a little of that great line from Ghostbusters: “dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”
The underlying dispute involves rival sellers of virtual animals that require the users to keep purchasing food to keep the animals alive.
Read the details > Second Life Ordered to Stop Honoring a Copyright Owner’s Takedown Notices–Amaretto Ranch Breedables v. Ozimals
Discussion:
Virtual living is huge and we are talking about millions of bucks to fake farm or and/or own fake pets.
pixelshopinfo splog
Readers, today I discovered several of my posts from this blog have been stolen from it. There’s no one I detest more than a content thief.
You are a content thief! I am a paralegal. You have stolen my content from my blog ie. these entire posts:
http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2010/05/21/select-a-wordpress-com-theme-2/
http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2010/05/19/how-to-select-a-wordpress-com-theme-part-1/
http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2010/05/19/optimize-for-perfection-optimize-for-speed/
http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2010/05/20/google-wave-goes-wide/
and breached my copyright which states:
Copyright © 2007 – 2010 All Rights Reserved
For copyright purposes, onecoolsitebloggingtips.com is not in the public domain. The fact that this blog owner publishes an RSS feed does not grant any rights for republication or re-use of the material except in the manner described below.
All content in this blog created by the blog owner and her guest authors is the property of the blog owner and her guest authors and protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and cannot be stored on any retrieval system, reproduced, reposted, displayed, modified or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise without written permission of the copyright owner except as noted below.
A brief excerpt of content (up to 50 words) may be quoted as long as a link is provided back to the source page on this blog and the authorship is correctly attributed.”
Remove all of my content from this site and every other splog you own at once. I’m following up with a DMCA removal notice to your web host.
Update May 23, 2010
My content has been removed from this splog however, the site does bear watching. Any blog with a tagline like the one on this site: “Technology is like fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes.” bears watching. The free theme studded with footer links to bad neighborhoods is gone and has been replaced with another theme. The remaining content on the site all looks as if it’s also been stolen.
Related posts found in this blog:
What is copyright?
Splog Off! Dealing with content theft
Spotting a splog
Trackback and Pingback spam: What to do?
April 26, 2010 marks the 10th anniversary of World Intellectual Property Day. Celebrations for this year’s edition of World Intellectual Property Day will revolve around the theme “Innovation – Linking the World”.
During the entire month of April, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office will raise IP awareness within the education sector and among small and medium enterprises (SMEs). CIPO’s Outreach team will offer IP networking opportunities and presentations nationwide. Continue reading
Updated: June 4, 2010 Watermarking any images you place on your blog or website is a practice used in addition to posting a copyright notice or license, and both are used to deter image theft. I have previously reviewed several free watermark generators available online that can be used to display copyright on your images either one at a time or in bulk, prior to uploading them to your blog. This article provides a link to another approach to deterring online image theft that you may wish to consider using.
… here’s a technique for you to make it just a bit harder for someone to get your images. Here, right-click on the image and click on Save Image As or Save Picture As to save it on your computer. See what you “saved”. — Cover Your Images
Updated: June 4, 2010 Protecting your images from online theft and reblogging
If you need more help then devblog has provided it in a forum thread:
wp.com users cannot add/edit the HTML (or in this case the PHP) files. I’ll try to explain as best as I can.You know, when you add a photo to your post, you click the media button, upload the image to your blog (or link it from another URL) then you click the “insert into post”, right?
Well, after doing that, you would switch to the HTML Editor, then you will see the HTML code that’s behind your post. After switching to the HTML editor, you would need to replace the existing HTML for the image that you just added with the code I provided; of course, you would need to make the necessary changes so that your image is displayed. Basically, the only things you would need to change in the inline CSS are the values of the “background” property as well as the “width” and “height” properties. Those would be the bits in capital letters: (minus the square brackets)
[
<img style="background: transparent url(YOUR-IMG-URL) 0 0 no-repeat; border: 0; height: IMG-HEIGHT; margin: 0 auto; padding: 0; width: IMG-WIDTH;" src="http://tfockler60.files.wordpress.com/YEAR/MONTH/nothing.gif" alt="Helghan Soldier" title="Helghan Soldier" width="IMG-WIDTH" height="IMG-HEIGHT" />]You would also have to upload the "nothing.gif" to your blog and point to it as shown in the example above (that's why I put YEAR and MONTH in caps because those will be different in your case).
You'd have to repeat this process with every image you want to post (however, you won't have to upload "nothing.gif" everytime you want to do this because you can always point to the same image).
The drawback is that it can be a laborious task if you have LOTS of images...
See also > Google Webmaster Central > "Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. " Hidden text, links, images, javacript, videos
Related posts found in this blog:
Thumbs down on WordPress reblogging
How to copyright your digital work
Copyright basics for bloggers
What is copyright?
Please forgive me for being behind in publishing new posts, answering comments and leaving comments this week. I have spent most of my blogging time this week arguing with blog scraping content thieves (who have stolen entire posts from both of my blogs), and sending DMCA complaints to their web hosts to get my content removed from the splog sites. I have now set my RSS feeds to summary so I can get back to blogging. I apologize for the inconvenience but I can see no other alternative.
Related posts found in this blog:
Copyright basics for bloggers
What is copyright?
Copyright: Fair Use Limitations
What to do about copyright
How to copyright your digital works
Splog Off! Dealing with content theft
Spotting a splog
(1) Copyright basics
The ignorance and misinformation about copyright and fair use has escalated as the numbers of content thieves and e-beggars has dramatically increased. Bloggers are expected to be able to sort facts from fiction, so if you are a newcomer becoming familiar with copyright law is part of the territory.
That protocol insures you are not violating copyright law, and encourages any reader who wants to read the full post to click the link and visit the original post on its author’s site.
Succinctly stated whether or not the author of any original digital work has posted a copyright notice on their site or the work itself is irrelevant. It does not change the fact that they hold the copyright to their works and it cannot be re-published unless or until their permission has been given.
The only time a complete post can be legally re-published is when prior written permission has been received from the copyright holder. In other words, the same rules that apply to the world of print also apply in cyberspace.
copyright
Copyright Law: 12 Dos and Don’ts
10 Big Myths about copyright explained
What is copyright?
Copyright Basics (from the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress) PDF
Plagiarism versus copyright infringement
(2) Dealing with content theft
Although the only time a complete post can be legally re-published is when prior written permission has been received from the copyright holder, theft of copyrighted material that is posted splogs that are pimp out for advertising income is common. Splog Off! Dealing with content theft
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (PDF – 330KB)
Suppose content thieves took the whole post and gave you a no-follow link ie. a link that will not be crawled by search engines. Well, that’s a detriment to you and to your blog. Why would any reader on the splog site click through to your site using that link to read the whole post when they have just read whole on the splog? Interpret the end result as lost traffic – no hits will come your way from the splog site.
And, how would you feel if the copy of your original post on their blog ends up placed higher in the Google search results than your original does and the splog site get far more hits that the original post does? Be aware that this can happen. Worse still it creates duplicate content which Google can penalize sites for.
(2) Spotting a splog
Splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Detailed information on spotting a splog.
(3) Detecting whether or not your work has been stolen
SplogSpot is service that keeps track of spam blogs or Splogs. The splogspot spam database can be queried by anyone using the SplogSpot API. This will help blog related services, directories etc keep their sites clean.
Copyscape also provides search facility you can use to look for copies of your page on the web.
(4) How to copyright your digital works
As the blogging phenomenon expands, copyright concerns become quite important. Technology makes it really easy to copy, modify and share information, whether we talk about text, images, audio or video. The problem is that the vast majority of people do not have a clear understanding of the Copyright Law, which might result in illegal and costly mistakes. As a blogger it’s important to take the steps required to protect your digital works and post a notice that you have done so to deter content theft.
Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.
MyFreeCopyright.com provides protection for Literary Works, Visual Arts, Performing Arts, and Sound Recordings.
creators.icopyright.com- protection for Literary Works Visual Arts Performing Arts Sound Recordings
Create circled C copyright symbols in HTML with & #0169; (ampersand-no space, pound sign, 0169, semi-colon).
Related post found in this blog:
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen from from the RSS feeds of other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites. Source: Wikipedia
In her article How to spot a splog Lorelle says:
“Splogs, spamming blogs, are often little more than link farms, a bunch of text stuffed with links to whatever they are selling. The easiest way to identify a splog is when nothing adds up nor matches. The content doesn’t match the links. The content doesn’t match the blog title or post title. There is a signature or name in the article that doesn’t match with the name of the post author or submitter.”
Angela Swanlund is a new blogger friend of mine. She’s been a full time professional freelance writer for 2 years, and part time for over 7. She’s an Author for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, History and Culture and is currently retained on contract to research the 1946 unsolved “Moonlight Murders” that took place in Texarkana, Arkansas. True crime is her normal genre, and she has covered such notorious individuals as Ronald Gene Simmons and the West Memphis Three. On occasion she does freelance work for area newspapers such as the Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, a 3 state regional farming publication. She also owns I also own Rural Family Living, LLC, a small retail sales business.
Angela and her co-author Patti Ann Stafford, the Editor of The Music Rocks!, have an emerging blog. Angela recently had blog content stolen and she has shared some splog spotting tips that I’d like to pass on to you.
