When Fans and Artists Collide
May 12, 2008 | Filed Under Ethics, Features, Legal, copyright | Leave a Comment
Earlier this week, a fan of the British TV series Dr. Who was forced to take a portion of his site offline after receiving a cease and desist letter from the BBC. However, Mazzmatazz, the fan is question, was not posting clips onto YouTube or making pirated copies of DVDs, but rather, posting knitting patters […]
Copyright and Twitter
May 5, 2008 | Filed Under Features, Legal, Twitter, copyright | Leave a Comment
Every time a new technology comes along that aides communication, copyright inevitably becomes an issue with it, at least to some degree. From piano rolls to radios to televisions to the Web, every great technology has shifted the copyright landscape and has had its course altered, at least in some way, by those protections.
Twitter is […]
What Orphan Works Could Mean to Bloggers
April 28, 2008 | Filed Under Features, Legal, Multimedia, Photos, Podcasting, Videos, copyright | 1 Comment
The orphan works legislation, last seen in 2006, now has the attention of Congress again with two similar bills, one in the House and one in the Senate. These bills, should either of them pass, could have a drastic impact on copyright holders both within and outside of the United States.
But what should bloggers expect […]
Copyright Infringement: The Most Common Outcomes
April 7, 2008 | Filed Under Features, Legal, Splogs, copyright, plagiarism | 2 Comments
It seems that a large number of bloggers run their sites with very little thought about copyright law. Though they don’t plagiarize content or scrape feeds, they grab images, copy large blocks of text and embed media without much thought to the original author or whether their use is truly “fair use“.
It seems that many […]
Cleaning Blogspot Spam: Is Google Responding to Public Pressure?
April 1, 2008 | Filed Under Blog Hosting, Blog News, Blogging, Editorial, Featured, Features, News, Social Media, Spam, Splogs, autoblogging software, copyright | 15 Comments
In Google! Clean Up Blogger! Now!, I wrote about how a simple search for a news story turned into a massive multi-page hunt through Google search results of Blogger Blogspot spam blogs, finally finding a possible legitimate blog answer on something like page five but having to go through even more pages to find a […]
How to Help Immunize Your Site Against Scraping
March 31, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging, Content Scraping, Features, Feedburner, Legal, SEO, copyright, plagiarism | 7 Comments
Scraping is one of the most annoying things that bloggers have to deal with. It can hurt their search engine ranking, cause confusion among readers and cause them to unwittingly help spammers line their pockets.
Nobody likes being scraped but it seems that some sites are able to survive it relatively unscathed while others are bumped […]
Blogging is About Writing - and Not
March 25, 2008 | Filed Under Blog Marketing and Monetization, Blog Monetization, Blogging, Comments, Content Scraping, Editorial, Ethics, Featured, Features, Guides and Tutorials, Legal, Marketing, Professional Blogging, Public Relations, SEO, copyright, plagiarism | 7 Comments
Blogging is about writing. That is a fact. You can video blog, podcast, and do all kinds of fun things with your blog, but it is the writing that makes or breaks a blog. What you say in the blog posts, descriptions of visual and audio elements, and what words you offer search engines for […]













