I’ve been reading about blogging copyright for the past hour, how to improve my own, and how to take action when my content has been hijacked. It’s always been a rather sour question, at least one when posed to other writers and artists I know and speak with.

“Is copyright important to you, and what do you do when your content is stolen?”

Some people are of the opinion that if you have a good idea, you share it, and that in turn opens the door to have others take it and do what they want with it. Good ideas aren’t much of anything if you keep them to yourself, where would we be if we did that? I doubt our interactions would be as satisfying, or our creative processes as liberating.

Others I know, from conversation, feel that when they take the time and energy to invest part of themselves in a project or idea and create something as an outcome, ultimately they want to protect their creation. It’s not because they don’t want others to enjoy it, they want the value of the work preserved. That might be as close as I can come to explaining in part how I feel about copyright.

I like art, I like experimenting with the creative process. I enjoy writing and blocking out my perspectives of the things and experiences I see and feel. I don’t, however, take for granted those things or the time it takes to collectively piece all of it together.

This article over at, Copyrighting Blog Content 101 l Andrew Pavelski DOT COM, touches on some of my own concerns about copyright attached to blogs and the content in them:

“In most cases, the person that takes material, will link to your website. I am fine with people linking to articles on my website within their blog posts, but when someone steals an entire article, it makes me a little bit upset. Luckily, no one has yet copied my material from this blog and re-posted it on their blog. Content theft has happened on a couple articles from my other blogs. One popular article is all it takes for people to get the brilliant idea that they should copy your entire article and re-post it on their blog. When hundreds of people end up linking to a single blog post, it’s tough to figure out which websites happen to be stealing your content.” – Andrew Pavelski

Also I’ve found this wordpress site helpful: What To Do When Someone Steals Your Content by Lorelle on WordPress:

“As the number of websites and blogs grow, especially splogs, the demand for content puts more pressure on website administrators, who may resort to stealing content in order to fill space on their sites and attract traffic. Website hijacking, as such an example, is on the rise. This is the blatant use of part or all of your site’s content on another site without permission. This is also a copyright violation and needs to be dealt with accordingly.” – Lorelle

The copyright is something I’ve been thinking about, if you check the top right hand corner of this web page, it’s posted there. I don’t think people think very much of the © symbol though, not just here, but worldwide. I know there are people that feel if it’s “out there, it’s free to use.” I’m not really of that opinion and try to be conscious of that fact when I talk about other sites and art/video/blogs/articles, etc,.