Friday, August 8, 2008

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How to Protect Copyright Electronically?

Plagiarism, the theft of intellectual property, troubles so many people today, especially the Internet entrepreneurs. For instance, when a blog slowly becomes popular, you will see its clones everywhere on the Net. The people stealing content from popular and worthy blogs get rich, useful content completely free. This issue has become one of the most debated in the Blogosphere.

Search engines like Google have strict policies against duplicate content on the Net. So, the sites that copy content from other sites usually get lower SERP positions. Hence, it is dangerous for your website to copy content from other sites. Extensive copying can get the site penalized by Google.

Introduction to Copyright

Copyright or “the right to copy” is an original right with the creator of some intellectual property to make copies of the creation. Without a written permission from the original creator, no one can copy or publicize the creation; otherwise, it’s a criminal offense.

Copyright is deemed to exist for all intellectual property as soon as the creation is transferred to a tangible medium such as text or digital medium like CD-ROM. Copyright registration is only a step to establish your copyright legally, as a proof in case you got copied. It’s not a necessity. You can protect your copyright without ever registering it. Also, it requires payment with the US Copyright Office.

In online publications, such as blogs or websites, copyright protection requires a proof that you own the work. This proof is provided by the blogging platform or the website hosting company itself. The particular date and time of publication of the content can act as a proof in this case.

Copyright Registration

You can register your copyright for all kinds of creations directly with the US Copyright Office. Their website provides the facility to upload files in digital format. This registration step involves a minor payment. There are also third parties that offer the registration with Copyright Office for a small fee. They help you get faster registration. The registration for copyrighted is limited to a specified period, such as 5 years or 10 years.

The publisher registers your copyright for all published books, such as fiction, educational books, anthologies, etc.

Poor Man’s Copyright or PMC

This is a way used in the yesteryear to prove the copyright. In this, what people do is that they put their creation in an envelope and send it registered to themselves. The idea is to get the postmark on the envelope. This postmark will prove the date of creation of the property. Poor Man’s Copyright is not a recommended practice and cannot fully prove the copyright of any material.

However, this method is not widely regarded to be an effective method to prove copyright, since it can be easily faked by anyone.

Reserving Some Rights: Creative Commons

In copyright, you reserve all rights to your creations. However, you can reserve some rights and let others take specific rights on the material by using the Creative Commons License, in exchange for credit through valuable links. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that helps you enforce your copyright by making it flexible. However, it can’t exist without copyright.

How to Protect Copyright of Blogs and Websites Free?

Now, we will see how to protect the copyright of your blogs or websites. This protection method is not meant for non-digital creations such as works written on paper.

You can protect your blog’s copyright with MyFreeCopyright.com. This service doesn’t register your copyright; copyright registration is different from protection, and you don’t need registration to protect your copyright. In order to protect your copyright, you need to verify the date and time of creation of your blog with an authority. MyFreeCopyright provides this authority free.

It is a three-step process to protect your copyright: Upload your original to MyFreeCopyright server; the server captures a digital fingerprint of the uploaded content; and the fingerprint is emailed to you. You have to keep the digital fingerprint securely. Moreover, you can display a logo provided by MyFreeCopyright for your visitors to know that your content is copyright-protected.

With MyFreeCopyright, you can protect your entire blog with one registration. You don’t need to submit each of your posts individually. Their feed fetcher indexes the entire blog and protects it.

The digital fingerprint from MyFreeCopyright can effectively prove your ownership of your content anywhere.

Conclusion

Plagiarism causes a loss of billions of dollars yearly worldwide. It has become one of the hottest topics in the Blogosphere. When you create your new blog, make it a habit to check it frequently with services like Copyscape to see any post gets stolen or not.

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008


Copyright is a universal enforcement to protect the intellectual property rights of content creators. It means “The right to copy.” Only the original creator of the work gets the right to copy the work anywhere else (that is, unless he sells that right). No one else holds any right to hi