Most of the bloggers wish to achieve great things with their own created blogs. However, it is useful to know that the fame or notoriety can leave the bloggers at the mercy of digital thieves looking to make a quick buck off of their hard work.

Blogging and copyright law

Being a blogger you put all your heart and soul into the websites. Whether you are providing information or doing research or giving opinions or providing entertainment, you just likely spend a lot of energy and time making information-rich and high-quality posts. The same thing goes for all the tangential content you produce to enhance your blogs like the videos or e books and courses. Naturally, you will wish to protect your hard work against tampering or theft, so it helps to be very familiar with how the copyright works.

This blog is all about

• What can you do as a blogger to register for copyright?
• Do you need to register your blog or post so that it can be protected?
• Why bloggers register for copyright?
• What is “fair use?”
• How does copyright work if blogging under a pseudonym?

Copyright laws protect bloggers

Copyright is a legal protection given to a created work, also called intellectual property or short known as IP. It means that if you are a blogger then your blog posts will be protected as well as other contents you create for your blogs like e-books or music or videos or software or podcasts or photos which suggests that you are the creator of it.

Should bloggers need to protect their blogs?

Once an Intellectual Property is produced in its final form for the bloggers which means hitting the “Publish” button becomes its author automatically and receives protection under the copyright laws. The protection is instantaneous with publication no further official copyright registration is required to claim the ownership of that content. You don’t even need the little circled-C symbol © that is the indication of your ownership. Although the bloggers are not required to file an official copyright registration but you may wish to do so, it’s completely up to you. That is because you cannot sue for the copyright infringement case unless you have officially registered your own work.

Can you register for the copyright to protect your entire blog?

Yes. Only the posts published through the registration date are actually protected. But any posts which are published after that date will require further additional registrations.

Practically, this means you have got two choices only for getting copyright registration. They are-

1. You can regularly send them in registrations for your entire blog that may be monthly or yearly.

2. You can register the most important posts or other content of yours as you are the one who creates them.

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How can bloggers protect their blogs from copyright?

Yes. Though you are automatically protected, it doesn’t suggest putting in place various reminders so that it can give an effect on your blog.

Steps to protect your work without copyright

• Put the copyright symbol “©” on each of the pages of your site along with your name and the date.

• Then create a special page about your reposting the terms and policies. You do not require legalese– clearly state what you will tolerate and what not concerning reposting your contents.

• Then sign up for the Creative Commons license.

• After that configure your RSS feed and after that, it only shows the summary of your own posts.

• Use platforms like Google alerts or searches or a plagiarism site to notify you of the plagiarized contents.

• Add watermarks to your image contents indicating the name and website yours.

• If you somehow discover that your Intellectual Property has been stolen, then you can simply issue a DMCA takedown notice.

How can the bloggers register for Copyright?

Bloggers can register for copyright in two ways either online or in paper forms.

Can copyright protect your blogs if blogging under pseudonyms?

Yes, bloggers can copyright their original works which are produced under pseudonyms. The bad news is that the length of the time one’s copyright remains in effect is actually shorter than what it would be if registered in real name.