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Personally, I would encourage host bloggers to use their best judgment when reviewing such complaints. Though it is always best to act on a cease and desist when you receive it and wait for legal council to tell you otherwise, your reaction should be based upon the nature of the request.

If it is a valid complaint or an obvious case of plagiarism, take it down post haste. If there are other issues raised, work with the original author to resolve them until you can get legal advice to do otherwise.

Just my take on the situation. Fortunately, these types of situations are relatively rare!

Thanks for the info. Another question that comes up is the issue of the guest blog host blogger working to protect the content of the guest blogger if the content has its copyright violated. As guest blogger, I’d want to know that the blog I’m contributing to will let me know or work to protect what I write and not think “Well, that’s not my work, even though it’s published on my blog, so I’m not going to do anything about it.”

Not that I think a blogger would, but the thought has crossed my mind.

There are only two ways you can assign copyright to another.

The first is through a work for hire. That only happens when you are a direct employee (in the Federal sense) of the person who is obtaining the copyright or if are a contractor, the work involved is a certain kind of work and a contract is signed before the work’s creation.

The other way is through a direct, written and signed contact offering the copyright ownership over to the other party.

Neither fits a typical guest blogging situation.

As such, a guest blogger does give some rights up to the work as part of an implied license, but the actual copyright stays with the author. In fact, if the use of the work changes beyond the bounds of the implied license, the original author could request removal of the work.

The best approach is to get a contract in writing, but few actually do that because of the nature of the Web. This is one of my bad habits too.

Excellent point indeed and thanks for the link to your series. I completely forgot about that! The months have flown by!

When you “give” your work away without checking these things from the basis of a writer, the site owner can do what they like with the content, to a point. I hope what you’ve written will help those who have guest bloggers, but I’d also like to know about this issue from the position of the contributing writer. What are our rights?

Also, to connect more dots on the issue of guest blogging, I wrote an article series called Learning the Art of Guest Blogging here on the Blog Herald. :D

Sandy: Something to consider at least, a lot of sites use them regularly.

Dan: It’s probably just a good idea before you hit “submit”. It only takes a few seconds fortunately.