Today I want to address a complicated and issue – copyright. I’ve found that many bloggers and others often misunderstand the copyright issue and in fact often confuse copyright with plagiarism. Not understanding can lead to actual legal problems.
First I’m going to look at plagiarism because it is the easier topic for most people to grasp. Plagiarism is when you use another’s words and pass them off as your own. Most writers grasp this and honestly very few writers want to plagiarize. Come on, we’re writers and authors and we like our own words too much.
But copyright infringement is a more complicated subject. Now, when I write or create something it is automatically copyrighted to me. I don’t have to do anything to create the copyright. It’s just automatically mine because the words are mine. Now, if you steal my words and pretend they’re yours, then you’re plagiarizing. But what if you take my words – say this blog post – and put it on your site but include the info that it was written by me. You aren’t plagiarizing. But you are guilty of copyright infringement.
In simplest terms – when a work is copyrighted, you need the permission of the person who holds the copyright to use the work. If you use the work without permission, you are violating the copyright — even if you give credit to the author of the work.
Why is this important? Well, since this is a blog, I’m going to present that in a blogging example. Many people blog as part of an affiliate program. This means they are working to write articles and blog posts that will bring people to their blog and perhaps from there to their affiliates. As a result, a better blog post actually translates to money. If another blogger borrows that post and puts it on their site, they are drawing people away from the original poster’s site and in turn can actually be making money from their affiliates based on content created by someone else. This is only one example of how copyright infringement translates to lost revenue for the original author. And yes, you can be sued for this.
Now there are some complexities in this. You can use quotes or excerpts from another writer as long as you attribute them and don’t use a large enough portion to be considered harmful. There is no legal amount for that, but you generally don’t want to take more than 10% of their content or have your writing be more than about that percent in borrowed content. Also commonly known facts can’t be copyrighted. Now the way those facts are analyzed might be. But you don’t have to worry about using common facts in a blog post or a story. As long as what you say around them is your own ideas in your own words.