Website Design, Search Engine Optimization

Everyone wants to protect what they create or own from copycats. Within the online communities of social media and blogging sharing words and images is both common and popular. Information, be it text or images, placed on the internet can travel swiftly with tools like twitter, fb and reblogging of websites. In this blog post I am specifically focusing on WordPress.com not the self hosted WordPress.org even though many of the points pertain to both.  With WordPress.com a web site or blog is hosted by WordPress all one has to do is open up an account. This is also true with tumblr where content is quite viral.

If WordPress hosts a blog or website all the content posted belongs to the site owner and is their property. According to WordPress “Terms of Services” they have permission to publish the information and to post the website content. That is the service they provide along with the tools to do it.  If the site owner chooses to use additional tools on WordPress community tags, to be in the search engine and so on they also have that right. These are avenues to get content promoted and published or out in the world.

Protecting Website and Blog Content

The site owner assumes the responsibility for the content on the site. Below are ways to protect on line content.

1. Adding a notice of copyright that should be clearly posted and can help prevent theft.
2. Obtain a Creative Commons license that has a standardized way to grant copyright permissions to creative work.
3. Photos and images should be watermarked to deter theft from the site.
4. Comments on posts are the site owners’ responsibility and they own them. It is the site owners due diligence to make sure comments are not harmful to anyone or anything in any way.

At the same time blog/site owners are responsible for protecting the content of others by asking  permission to post another’s content. If a website owner quotes or uses an image from another site it is expected to give the creator or the website credit and add a link.

Reblogging

Reblogging is a method and a tool on some websites like WordPress.com and tumblr to promote and publish a websites content. People like to reblog information they find compelling. They do have the right to use text, images or other content from a site hosted on their servers to help promote the site but again they do not own it. This method of republishing content gives credit to the content creator and at the same time additional publicity. You can learn more about reblogging on WordPress.com by clicking the link.

If one is worried about any content being republished or copied the only effective way is not to publish it or use a private blog with password protected posts. Read about page visibility .

I hope this helps ease anxiety when placing content on the internet. I do not claim to be an attorney or expert in this field. If there are more concerns you may want to consult a professional in this area.  Additional thoughts or comments on this subject are appreciated.