Authors can treat their content to preserve its value by committing to "Protect, Inform, Police, and Respect." Bloggers may have enhanced Free Speech rights and protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Marketplace and Quality Assurance Presentation - Vincent Chirchir
Bloggers and the law: What to know before you publish.
1. Bloggers and the Law:
What to know before you
publish
Katherine L. Sunstrom
Lorance & Thompson, PC
@beingkatie
#BlogElevated
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The text of this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share
Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
Christine Tremoulet’s images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unite States License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en
3. Do you value your content?
• Protect
• Inform
• Police
• Respect
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4. What is Copyrightable* Subject
Matter?
• Original
• Fixed in a tangible medium
*legal term, wrong meaning.
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5. What are my rights in my content?
• Copy
• Distribute
• Display
• Make derivatives
• Each is a stick in your
bundle of rights.
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6. It is your bundle.
• You can give away sticks from your bundle.
• License people to copy and distribute.
• Can hold back the right to make $ from
images/content.
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7. Protect your bundle.
• Copyright provision in contracts
• Useful licensing tools:
creativecommons.org
• Registrations
• Copyright notices on
distributed and digital images
• Take-down notice
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8. Protect your bundle with a
registration.
• Copyright.gov
• Form CO (all works) $35- electronic filing
• Constructive Notice
• More statutory protection
• Within 3 months of “publication”
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9. How to share.
• Creative commons licenses
• Attribution
• Non-commercial
• No derivatives
• Share Alike
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Protect and Inform:
12. Tell people how to treat your bundle.
• Copyright notice
• Not required
• Useful to avoid violation
• Instructive as to what others can do with your
content
• Enhanced damages- willfulness
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Inform:
14. Awesome example from Derek
Powazek.
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Derek has a great tutorial on how to
size your images and put them on
your page so that this shows up in the
raw image if someone was to try and
grab it. See his post at
http://powazek.com/posts/867
15. Police
• How to find and deal with infringers:
– http://www.plagiarismtoday.com
/stopping-internet-plagiarism/
– http://www.copyscape.com/
– Google image search.
• Digital Fingerprint on your RSS feed?
• DMCA takedown notices.
• The Court of Public Opinion
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16. Respect
• Blogging and copyright liability
• DMCA agent
– Copyright.gov
• Understand licensing
• Understand what you can and cannot use
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17. Dispel the myths about copyright.
• People will respect your bundle
• Mail it to yourself
• Copyright notices are offensive
• Desire not to offend the public outweighs protecting
your rights
• Photographing a painting or other visual work
circumvents copyright laws
• Making a painting or drawing from a photo
circumvents copyright laws
• If its licensed under Creative Commons I can use it.
• If I link back to the author I can copy it.
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18. Resources.
• Copyright.gov
• Compfight.com- CC image search engine
• Ccpics.com- collection of CC licensed images
• Creativecommons.org
• How to find and deal with infringers:
– http://www.marketingdock.com/copyrights/dealing-
with-copyright-infringement.php
– http://www.copyscape.com/
– http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/
• Derek Powazek’s copyright notice suggestions:
– http://powazek.com/posts/867
• EFF- Blogging and copyright liability
– https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/IP
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19. Bloggers’ Rights
• You can be a journalist!
• Free Speech
• Anonymous Speech
• Section 230
• Bloggers’ rights:
https://www.eff.org/bloggers
• Legal Guide for Bloggers:
https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal
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26. Questions?
Katie Sunstrom
Lorance & Thompson, P.C.
2900 North Loop West, Suite 500
Houston, Texas 77092
P: 713.868.5560
F: 713.864.4671
C: 713.502.3049
E: ks@lorancethompson.com
@beingkatie
@stalkerlawyer
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*This presentation is available online at http://www.slideshare.net/sunstromlaw/
Notes de l'éditeur
Plugin or feedburner to add digital finger print. Copyscape : A great tool for quick plagiarism searches. Plagium : A Copyscape alternative that is free and based on Yahoo! Google Alerts : A free service that can automate basic plagiarism checks and email you results. FairSare : A tool to detect misuse of content in an RSS feed. Digital Fingerprint Plugin : A WordPress plugin to detect RSS scraping. Tineye : A visual search engine that looks for copies of an image. FeedBurner : Offers feed modification and analysis tools that can make detecting RSS scraping much easier.
Take advantage of the DMCA safe harbor rule. If your commenters or online community is autonomous, you need some protection.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. 47 USC § 230(c)(1).
Arizona case “ The COO of Horizon Human Services, Billie Holliday, was the architect of my termination, and the CEO, Norman Mudd, was the one who executed it. They have fired many sick employees without a thought or care in the world for the horrible position they are placing those people in.”