What you need to know about copyright

What is copyright?

Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.

What does that mean?

Basically put, once you publish original content or images, and I’m specifically talking about online publishing, once you publish to the Internet, you own the copyright. You are the creator of the content and/or images, and they belong to you.

Can people take it from my site and use it on theirs?

Not legally without your permission. They doesn’t mean they won’t, but they legally shouldn’t.

Let me share a story…

Earlier this year, I was on Twitter and another person I follow mentioned how she’d found a site that has stolen all her content, including her images and bio, and was using it on their site. She was incensed, of course. She mentioned that people should use copyscape.com to check to see if their content is being stolen.

I didn’t imagine in a million years that anyone would be using ours because we’re a super small business. So just for fun, I went there and typed in my URL. And got 19 results. Nineteen sites were copying our content. Some of them word for word. Some of them just a few paragraphs or sentences.

I was understandably upset. I started by contacting these people. A few apologized and changed their content. A few didn’t respond at all. One guy claimed he hired an Indian firm to make his site, and they must have done it. And at least four people claimed to have written that content on their own. It’s amazing how five of us all were able to write the exact same, word-for-word content!

Here’s the problem…

It can be really difficult to prove you own the copyright to published online works, especially when so many people are using your content. We’ve been in business for 10 years, and luckily I was able to use the Wayback Machine to show how long I’ve had that copy, and literally go back through the archives and prove my site had it first.

What happens if you’re caught stealing content?

I no longer contact copyright violators. I go straight to Google and report the sites for DMCA violations. Once Google confirms that you own the copyright, they will remove the violators’ websites from the search results. Meaning that whatever gain they were hoping to get by copying the content is lost when they are no longer showing up in Google’s index.

I don’t know if the site owners are contacted when their sites are pulled or not; it doesn’t matter.

Part II of the Story

I recently did another copyscape search, hoping that I’d find less violators. This time, I got 29 results. TWENTY-NINE! This is insane. My content is clearly no longer original content since so many sites are using it. I reported 19 of these sites to Google, and 18 of them were removed from the Google index for violating my copyright.

And now I am writing all new original content for our homepage since our old content is being so widely used all over the Internet. I’m hoping to have the new content in place by the beginning of next week.

How do I protect my content?

If I had a good answer to that, I wouldn’t have so many sites on the Internet with my content. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I try to look at it that way.

What about images? Can I use images I find on the Internet?

NO. If it’s not your image, you can’t use it. If you see an image you want to use, ask the image owner. Sometimes they’ll say yes. (But definitely get it in writing.) You can also buy images to use from lots of stock photo websites.

I had a client who used an image they found online, not really paying attention to who owned it, and they got slapped with a $500 bill for it. I’ve had other clients be fined for using graphics without permission as well. It’s just a bad idea. Don’t do it.