Blog Content - Who Owns it?

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Ok so there’s a bit of a bru-ha-ha over who owns what, and what they can do with “your” blog content. As my screen writer buddy Cocles pointed out,

… This is where some dingnut screams, “But everything you write automatically has copyright from the moment it’s written down!”

Yes. That’s true. You’re very smart. Shaddup.

Yes, your work has copyright from the moment it’s written down, but you can’t do anything with that copyright until it has been registered.

for more see (The Writers Guild Registration Myth)

Clearly copyright law hasn’t been keeping up with technological advances.The current problem started with Martin Schwimmer, Bloglines, Scoble, and lastly Russell Beattie. In a nutshell Martin is upset because Bloglines took his RSS feed, striped out all of his contact info and reposted it on their website. The contentt from his text triggered advertising for his competitors (just like that google adsense I keep telling everyone about). Now most of these people are working with a Creative Commons license. Which basically says you can repost the content as long as it’s not for commercial use and you credit the author. Now we all like services like Bloglines and other RSS aggregator websites (note your personal RSS aggregator is a whole different thing), but are they legal? They have to pay the bills, while maybe in spirit they aren’t breaking the law but if you follow it to the letter they are. Some of the best solutions com from Staci at paidcontent.org:

How To Control Your RSS Feeds: First step: Don’t publish one. If you don’t want your RSS feed to be read in every RSS reader and news aggregator, if you can’t cope with the lack of control, skip it.

…A better solution — since he’s advertising his firm — would be to insert an info line in every post that comes through the feed….

for more see ( How To Control Your RSS Feeds)

Now my buddy Nick over at threadwatch brings up the point we in the search community have been talking about for years. Aren’t search engines like google taking your content and storing and using it for there own commercial gain? Clearly copyright law hasn’t been keeping up with technological advances. So this may start to get interesting here in the online world and may even wind up in courtrooms in the upcoming months.

In the meantime maybe all of us bloggers need to think about updating our copyright policies, deciding to use creative commons or not. Decide if we want to publish full or snippet RSS feeds, and why. Maybe the kind folks at blogger can work on getting a signature into our automatic feeds.

Sphere It

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