Blogging 101: How To Copyright Your Content and Reduce Plagiarism

Unfortunately an issue in the blogging world is content being stolen. Whether it’s plagiarism of a written blog, stealing photos or copying a video word for word, it’s frustrating when someone else capitalises on your hard work.

What is Copyright?

First up, let’s talk about what Copyright is. Most of the legal talk in this post is appliable to the UK where each country often has different rules around copyright and you can usually find it on the government website under intellectual property (IP). However in most countries copyright will last a minimum of life plus 50 years and through international agreements your content will be protected by copyright across multiple countries.

Copyright is what protects creative works and IP for an individual and copyright protection is applied automatically from creation. According to the government this can apply across:

• original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work, including illustration and photography
• original non-literary written work, such as software, web content and databases
• sound and music recordings
• film and television recordings
• broadcasts
• the layout of published editions of written, dramatic and musical works

I’ve highlighted above what will most likely apply to you as a blogger, as your web content and images will fall under copyright. You can mark your work with ©, you name and the year of creation, however your work is copyrighted whether you use the symbol or not. So simply by publishing your blog post will copyright your content.

Terms of Use

The first thing you should do to inform readers that your content is definitely protected under copyright is to include Terms of Use in your policy page. Including something along the lines of:

Readers may not modify, copy, reproduce, sell, or distribute any content in any manner or medium without permission from the creator.

gives you something to refer to in the case of someone stealing your content. You can include this on every page on your site using the footer to make it easily accessible for all readers no matter which page they’re on.

Use DMCA

Another way of ensuring your copyright status is declared to readers, and hopefully reducing the chances of content being stolen is to get a free DMCA badge to display on your site and register your site. Whilst the DMCA is based on US copyright laws, the company has knowledge of international copyrght laws and can conduct copyright takedown and removal services on your behalf. So officially copyright your content through a third party to gain increased protection.

Finding Plagiarism

A long way to check if content has been plagiarised is to take a paragraph of your content and pasting it into google. If other sites show up in this result, then they’ve probably stolen your work. Double check the website before jumping to conclusions though, and check against your original work.

You can set up Google Alerts too for these paragraphs if you want to be informed if someone does duplicate your work. Use the paragraphs or your exact blog title in quotation marks to get emails straight into your inbox.

Alternatively you can use Copyscape to check specific URLs on your site to see if there’s duplicated content elsewhere. This is a free tool for the first few results, however you do have to pay if you want to check more pages.

If you’re creating content with internal links, there’s a chance those copying and pasting will also copy the links including. This is where enabling trackbacks comes in handy for WordPress users. WordPress will let you know if your blog posts get a ping and you can see exactly when they post.

Cease and Desist

If the above hasn’t stopped someone from stealing your blog posts, You have every right to request them to remove the content. Email is often the best method although DMing on social media can work too. Often once caught, those who plagiarise quickly remove the content in order to save face.

If this doesn’t resolve your problem you can send a formal cease and desist letter. You could potentially use a lawyer to send this if you have one, although you can send one as yourself too. Cease and desist letters are more formal than an email request as they need to outline the post/content that was taken with links, summaries, dates etc and will often give a timing of within 72 hours to comply.

5 Copyright Myths

1. Copyright my Name or Title

First things first is copyright acts on your actual content but not the name or title. Whilst the content of this blog post is copyrighted one I’ve finished, you could write a blog post called “Blogging 101: How To Copyright Your Content and Reduce Plagiarism” yourself and it wouldn’t be a copyright issue (although it could be a moral issue…). The same goes for your blog name, it’s not protected by copyright. Although if someone was using your blog name of social media for example, there would be an issue if they were trying to pass off as you as it’s intention is to mislead or confuse the public. Alternatively, you can trademark your name.

2. Copyright My Ideas

Despite the popular belief, you cannot copyright your ideas. For example, the idea is a Book Tag based on your favourite novel, the content is the blog post or video you’ve created of this book tga.. Someone else could create a different book tag based on the same novel, and whilst the ideas are similar (and it may be friustrating) it’s not copyright infringement. You can copyright your content but not the idea of the piece of work.

3. Content without a © is Free to Use

Whilst the © is a helpful tool to know exactly when something is copyright – it’s better to think in a mindset of everything is copyright unless sepcifically stated that it can be copied, modified etc.

4. Copyright Doesn’t Apply to Adaptations

Adapting a piece of work is still infringing on copyright unless the orginal piece of work is in the public domain. The easiest way to explain this is to look at books, many books have adaptations but you’ll notice these are usually stories that are already in the public domain like Cinderella and Peter Pan. Books like 50 Shades of Grey and Cassandra Clare’s series have been surrounded by controversy due to them both being originally fanfiction, although edited and adapted enough to be different to source content.

5. Only Copying Parts of Content Isn’t Copyright Infringement

I’ve seen some bloggers who’ve plagiarised being called out not for stealing a whole post but certain paragraphs only. Whilst you may write additional work that is original, those paragraphs used will still be protected under copyright. Just using parts of a piece of work doesn’t negate the copyright.