Works for Me Wednesday - Copyright Laws

I don't ever expect to be a blogger that receives 1500 visits and hour, but I am still concerned with copyright laws. There are far too many times I've read something and then written about it later, only to ask myself..."now where did I read that?" because I wanted to give credit to the source.

I stumbled across an article entitled Copyright Laws: 12 Do's and Don'ts written by Daniel at Daily Blog Tips and it certainly gave me pause. I'm not even going to quote much of it here...if you read it in its entirety, you'll see why.

The three that struck me the most were:

DONT’S
7. Don’t assume that if you credit the author there is no copyright infringement: a lot of people wrongly think that if they credit the author of an article or image they are not violating the copyright law. You can only use copyrighted material if you have explicit permission from the author to do so (or if you make fair use of it, as explained before).
8. Don’t copy material just because it does not show a copyright message: the Copyright Law required a copyright notice to protect works until 1977. In 1978, however, the law changed and abolished the requirement for copyright notice. This means that every published work (be it on paper or digital media) automatically gets copyright protection, whether expressed with a notice or not.
9. Don’t equate Creative Commons with “free for grab”: while Creative Commons licenses are less restrictive then standard copyright they should not be interpreted a “free for grab”. In order to understand what you can or can not do with Creative Commons material you should check what kind of license it is using. Certain licenses will require you to credit the original author, while others will require that you release any modifications of the document under the same license.

As bloggers, we should all be aware that there could be legal issues if we aren't careful. For more WFMW tips, head on over to Shannon's.

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