Know your “writes”

Information on the internet is immediate. Trends are created and die within a very short space of time. If the mainstream media are to be believed, blogging only really started in 2006. By then, I was running two blogs, having previously abandoned a further four. Mainstream media might have more of the respect, but they aren’t always very quick to pick up on things…

But now they have noticed blogging, it isn’t always a good thing. Bloggers who blog anonymously are ruthlessly tracked down, exposed, and if they refuse to co-operate, a hatchet-job opinion piece is run on them. Worse still is a condescending attitude that the press have towards those who blog, or produce other creative online endeavours.

The attitude is that these can be used by the mainstream media however they see fit. In the UK, a rather prominent blogger found one of his posts, reprinted, word-for-word, in one of our most prominent Sunday newspapers, without his permission. Rather than simply complain, he sent them an invoice, arguing that any other freelancer would be paid for an article, so why shouldn’t he. You can read the Mail on Sunday’s patronising response (although they did pay) here, but the thrust of the argument used by the newspaper was this:

1. The blog was online, and therefore in the public domain;
2. The blogger was an amateur, and therefore ought to be happy to have received the publicity.

These arguments are of course a nonsense, but betray a worrying attitude.

Firstly, public domain has a very specific legal meaning. It does not simply mean “freely available”. If it did, you would be free to copy the text of the latest bestseller on the basis that you could borrow it in the library. Yesterday’s newspaper pulled out of the trash is not “public domain”. Creative works only enter the public domain after their copyright has expired, or if the author of the work explicitly places the work into the public domain (difficult to do, but not impossible).

Freely distributed does not mean free to republish, and although the specifics of the law vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, in 99% of cases you would be right to assume that what you are reading on someone’s blog or website is protected by copyright and cannot be reused without the author’s explicit consent. As soon as something is put into a fixed form, it is covered by copyright.

The “fair use” doctrine (including limited re-use for review/criticism purposes) and such initiatives as the Creative Commons License extend the ability of other people to use copyrighted material, but always under restrictive conditions. For instance, my writing site is covered by a Creative Commons License that states that you are free to re-publish any material on my site, without my permission, so long as you attribute the work to me, you do not modify the work, and you are not doing so for commercial purposes. Any violation of these three restrictions (and reprinting in a newspaper would be “commercial purposes”) is a breach of the license and would require my explicit consent.

The attitude that since we do not charge people to read our words, we agree to have any media use our work for their own purposes is worrying to bloggers, but more so for online writers. You cannot copyright an idea (as the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail discovered when they unsuccessfully tried to sue Dan Brown for writing the Da Vinci Code) but you own the copyright over your work. If we did not, we would never write or blog. If the press increased their unauthorised use of blogs, and worse, if publishers began publishing work they had discovered “free” online, then we’d all give up.

So much for the law. Now for the second argument, that as amateurs we ought to be glad to see our work plagiarised.

Restated like that, you can immediately see the flaw in the argument. Yes, it is great to have your work exposed to a wider audience in another medium. And if a national newspaper contacts you and says “we thought this was really compelling, we’d like to reproduce this as an article in our paper, would that interest you”, few would say no. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the work is taken without notice and without permission, the discover made only fortuitously, the labours of the original author not even considered as the violation is committed. And then we are expected to be grateful?

So be careful about your online writing. Because you do it without a profit in mind, does not mean you should not guard it jealously. Others ought not to profit from your generosity.