i just started blogging about art events 2 months ago. It’s because I went to art exhibition/ performances/ museums almost every week, and loving it, and I’d like to share the experience with the world.

So currently I’m putting it on my blog, with stories of the exhibited artwork. Is it legal? I didn’t ask permission for the pictures, obviously.

Please look at it at http://goodlorax.blogspot.com and let me know what you think.

Thank you so much !!

I was very upset, but fortunately I found a protected (locked)pdf file, that I created, of a big portion of my website, including the content in question. The pdf properties contain my name as the author and the date the document was created, which was April 7, 2008. I also emailed the pdf file to myself on that date as an attachment and saved the email. I am going to send out cease and desist letters next week.

My suggestion to everyone is that until you are able to submit your content to the copyright office, consider doing what I did in order to create a date of possession/creation that can’t be replicated or easily refuted by anyone else.

Your average scrapper won’t be a problem because they’re probably pretty clueless or misinformed. The problem might be that you run up against an blackhat SEO who actually knows what they’re doing and they pull some dirty tricks to get your site deindexed, your Adsense or affiliate accounts banned and so forth.

I’m glad you had some luck beating a scrapper though. I haven’t had any success at it and deemed it too much of a distraction, too risky and too stressful to pursue over a year ago.

I appreciate your intent here, in helping people, esp bloggers, to protect themselves, but as many have noted above, there are a few significant errors in your research.

First, as someone has noted above, Creative Commons (CC) is not meant to lay “on top of ” an “all rights reserved” USCO registration, because they are inherently exclusive of one another.

Copyright (all rights reserved) denotes that you retain all rights to your work, and that technically, no one can repost, share, etc without expressly getting permission from you each time. To protect themselves, they would then technically want to get that permission in writing so as not to put themselves at risk of being sued by you.

Imagine if every post that was worth sharing required a person to ask you, in writing, for permission (not only to re-post but even to distribute via email, or print on a printer and hand to a neighbor, etc.) Sounds silly, because it would be.

In the internet/digital age, Creative Commons came around noting that this level of preservation of rights was silly. It was throttling the nature of sharing and the law was too restrictive for common practice.

It’s too easy (and too beneficial) to share content. CC put together less restrictive copyright levels so that a content owner can retain certain rights while granting others.

I’ve worked in close concert with CC directors here in San Francisco for several years with my content site (http://dublit.com), which is the first of its kind to offer creative writers the option of a traditional copyright in the upload process, or CC licensing. For creative writers, since there is another method of registering content with the WGA, we offer that as well as an option.

Finally, your comment about TM vs C being that TM always has to be registered is also not true. Anyone has the right to stamp TM on anything that they create. Registration is simply a method to create an ostensibly neutral and easily referenceable 3rd party archive of that stamp having been created, just like registering a Copyright (all rights reserved).

I hope that helps – the issue here is finding a healthy balance between hording content rights and sharing content with the world. Increasingly, sharing content seems to be getting more popular, and monetization avenues are being devised in parallel to support this new model of thought around intellectual property.

By no means am I saying that you or anyone else doesn’t have the right to copyright and retain all rights, but the question is whether you actually want to, and if it’s the best strategy for your overall content distribution goals.

The Creative Commons tools are designed for the more liberal levels of content licensing that are arguably in closer concert with today’s digital distribution tools and social norms.

Warm regards and thanks for initiating this discussion,

John
managing director
dublit.com

I also highly recommend reading plagiarismtoday.com

Not true. You have to be registered before you can get statutory damages. You do not need to be registered in order to get actual damages or injunctions.

“trade marks always has to be registered in a legal way, for a lot of money.”

Completely false. Trademarks do not have to be registered.

Maybe we should leave opining about intellectual property law to people who actually know what they’re talking about. This is one of those cases where bad information is worse than no information at all.

@Charles: yeh, fairshare.cc. I signed-up for it a few days ago, just waiting for the data. Hmm, I should check now.

It’s also my understanding that a Creative Commons license is a method of spelling out what the holder of the copyright will and will not allow to be done with his/her work. There are alternative Creative Commons licenses which claim “Some Rights Reserved” and another which puts a work fully in the public domain. With respect to syndicated feeds, there is a group associated with Creative Commons at fairshare.cc that allows one to register his/her feed and license, and they attempt to track the content to discover if and when it is re-used.

For me, the real gray area of copyright is fundamental to the nature of the web itself. In a very real sense, the web is one large hypertext document. The question becomes how does one protect one’s piece of that document without violating the rights of another contributor?

@denis: regarding

“[...]The moot question is how do we stop the content-theft epidemic?[...]“

If Darren agrees too, I’d be happy to share some tips which I learned. But basically it would be a collection of tips which are already published somewhere on the net many times, i fear.

My site and many others sites are being strolen/scraped on a daily basis (or per post basis), with RSS feed aggregator websites displaying full text posts and images without permission to do so. One site in particular, Elanso.com, is based in China and DMCA notices and reports to Google have been ignored. I emailed the responsible party shown on the Elanso Contact Us page, but have received no response whatsoever, and Google hasn’t responded to my fax either. I managed to get “banned” from fav.or.it.com, who was displaying full feed content and images without permission, after I complained vehemently about their practice. Getting banned never felt so good.

I’m not yet convinced at all that Google bigwigs (or other search engines) care one little bit about the “little guys” in the blogosphere. Finding out that your original post has been stolen/scraped is bad enough, but when you discover the stolen post ranks better in Google than your original and that they’re running Google Ads alongside YOUR original post, that’s when the gloves come off and I’m ready for a fight.

I agree with you though regarding the good content. If somebody would ask me when to file a take-down notice I’d say only in extreme cases or when you have nothing better to do. I found it quite amusing to play the big-guy and send DMCA notices :)

Regarding the blackhatter thing, what do you men?

For example, Google won’t do a thing against Blogger scrappers without considerable paper documentation being mailed to them and they’ll take weeks to process it. Most others won’t do a thing either. It gets even worse if the person or hosting company in question is located in a country with lax copyright laws. Even worse, you might find yourself in a fight with a blackhatter who’ll make trouble for you online.

Bottom line, it’s not worth it in most cases to fight it. I still recommend just using good SEO, good content and good social media usage to stomp the lazy scrapper into the ground.

The simplest to understand explanation has already been brought out in the paragraph above which reads:

“…as soon as you publish an article on your blog, that’s automatically copyrighted…”

The moot question is how do we stop the content-theft epidemic? Instead of taking recourse to legal action, which takes time and money, there need to be some simple system in place whereby the content thief and his/her site/blog bearing stolen content can be blacked listed and simultaneously banned by hosting company immediately pending resolution of the matter.

JC John Sese Cuneta:
1) You can not mix Copyright/All Rights Reserved with Creative Commons.
2) By using Creative Commons, your content is automatically copyrighted to you first, then you release some rights.

Gary:
@JC John Sese Cuneta:
1) it’s against the common sense
2) Creative Commons does not replace a copyright, it just extends it and only works on TOP of an existent copyright

It turns out that, for #1, we really can not mix (C) / All Rights Reserved with any Creative Commons license because the two are not compatible. (C) / All Rights Reserved is our claim that “ALL” Rights are reserved by the author. As such, any one who wishes to use the author’s work must first ask for a written permission. While a Creative Commons license, for example, CC By (which is very popular in Flickr), you gave away some of your rights, and thus it is not “ALL” Rights reserved any longer.

For #2 above. As was quoted from my first reply, the “License” section in each Creative Commons License (which is the very first we will see when reading the Legal Code itself [not the Human version]), states that (quoted verbatim) “THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT LAW IS PROHIBITED”.

This is actually the same in concept (and process) with the GNU and Open-Source Licenses. Original Works are first Copyrighted to you by the License you are using, then you share “some” rights, this is especially true with GNU/GPL and GNU/FDL (I use GNU/FDL in some of my works), other than CC Licenses.

Anyone using a CC License can not enforce plagiarism, as all CC v3.0 Licenses states that anyone is “free to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work”.

However, it is very important to note that Attribution is required, the only condition that is true in all CC v3.0 Licenses:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

For CC users, we can enforce Attribution if not given. All other conditions depends on which CC License you are using. But definitely not plagiarism, unless it now covers “non-Attribution”.

The most restrictive CC v3.0 License is CC By-NC-ND 3.0.

Now again, I am not an expert about this matter, not even of the law (and I live in the Philippines). This is only the result of my own personal research and consultations in the past and well, recently (after reading this post, I have to consult again to be sure).

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Follow-Up on the Off-Topic TM sign:
(I’m including this since we’re on the topic of ‘protection’. And I’ve witnessed brand-theft [if there is such a term or phrase] before.
Just remember that Trademark and Copyright are two different things. Not because you have worked on your Copyright / Copyleft Licenses, does it mean that your brand is protected as well, especially if you have a Logo.)

According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)

Any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the “TM” (trademark) or “SM” (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO. However, you may use the federal registration symbol “®” only after the USPTO actually registers a mark, and not while an application is pending. Also, you may use the registration symbol with the mark only on or in connection with the goods and/or services listed in the federal trademark registration.

(Bold, their emphasis, not mine.)
Source: http://www.uspto.gov/go/tac/doc/basic/register.htm

From the WIPO website (http://www.wipo.int/madrid/en/faq/trademarks.html)

The TM symbol denotes that a given sign is used by the holder as a trademark (whether this sign is the subject of a trademark application or not).

I asked about the use of TM and (R) 6 years ago from our local IP Office here in the Philippines, and TM can be used even if the trademark is “unregistered” (and as also stated above from USPTO and WIPO). The one that is restricted is the (R) symbol which means “Registered” Trademark.

So, to anyone who wishes protect their own brands and logos, add the TM symbol. But again, remember that there is more power if you registered it and not just stake a claim. Just weigh things first, see if it is worth the effort and the money. Most bloggers doesn’t need to worry about trademarks :p

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Ok, now to read the all the comments since my last visit. :p