If you have a blog and are running it professionally, you must be posting original content on it. It is not easy to produce tons of authentic content or even hire someone to make new posts on your blog every day.
Individuals and organizations that regularly publish original content on their blogs must protect their content from being copied. Due to the vast amounts of information available on the internet and the ease of copying text from an existing website to a new website, copyright infringement has become very common.
It is the responsibility of every content creator and blogger to protect their content by creating a copyright policy and enforcing it actively. There are certain actions you can take that can help you copyright your blog. Blog copyright is not something that only tech-savvy experts or SEO masters can have. It is something anybody who knows how to use the internet can do.
If you want to know how to copyright your blog, then you have come to the right place. In this post, we will be discussing different ways that can help you copyright your blog. Therefore, we highly suggest not skipping any part of this article to know more about copyright for blog. It enables you to protect your author's attribution. It also helps you maintain high search rankings by keeping your content original and unique across the internet.
Why Do You Need to Copyright Your Blog?
All bloggers need to know that when you build a blog on a platform like WordPress, it is usually automatically granted copyright. There is built-in copyright that comes with most of the website-building platforms and themes. It implies that anyone who wants to use your content must ask for your permission or attribute it back to you. But this does not mean that, as a blog owner, your job is done. Some people might still steal your content, that is, use it without your permission or without attributing it back to you.
The best thing to do for such situations is to take the necessary actions or steps to copyright your blog correctly and further protect your content. You might feel like that’s a time-consuming thing to do, but it’s worth it and better than finding your articles copied on someone else’s blog or website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
You also get another distinctive advantage of blog copyright. Copyright for blog acts as tangible proof of your ownership over your blog content. This means if someone copies your content, you have the authority to take legal action against them. You get more substantial legal grounds plus an added sense of protection against those who might steal or scrape your blog articles to use on their website without your consent.
How to Copyright a Blog?
Here are six steps you can take to copyright your blog properly.
1. Add a Copyright Notice
Most of the website-building platforms, as mentioned above, come with a built-in copyright notice. For example, you use Strikingly to create a website. In that case, almost all the templates you’ll have to select are equipped with a default copyright notice. Have a look at the copyright at the bottom of a sample site built on Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
When you insert content into the template, you can change the default name in the copyright notice to your blog name. Usually, you can do this by changing the footer settings because the blog copyright is part of the footer.
It is good to keep the copyright for blog as short as possible. The necessary components are just the copyright symbol, the date of launch of your blog (or just the year), and your brand or business name.
Changing this copyright notice should be the first step you take to copyright your blog.
2. Add a Terms & Conditions Page
Taking the first step mentioned above should be good enough to ward off most people who might try to steal your content. But it is always good to take further precautions. In the second step, you spell out what people are allowed and not allowed to do with your content. You can do this by adding a page to describe the Terms of Use for your blog.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
You might feel like creating a Terms of Use page is a technical job to do, but it’s straightforward because most website themes either come with a ready-made Terms & Conditions page template or can be integrated with tools that help you generate the page with a single click. Examples of such tools are Formswift and Termsfeed. All you need to do to use these tools is enter some basic information. The page will be created automatically. Then, you can just copy and paste the text generated into a new page on your Strikingly website and name it ‘Terms of Service’ or ‘Terms of Use’. You might also want to place a link to this new page in the footer of your site, right next to the blog copyright. This is a major step to take to copyright your blog.
3. Register Your Blog Copyright
By default, anyone who creates original content has copyright protection for it. Suppose something triggers a copyright infringement, and you want to take legal action. In that case, you will have to copyright each blog post individually.
For doing that, you need to file an application and submit it to the registered authorities in your locality. You can register for multiple posts at the same time through the copyright office. If your blog is active and has a lot of traffic, it is preferable to do this more than once every year. It will cost you money, but protecting your content will be worth it if your blog makes you good money.
4. Protect Your Blog Images
If you upload original images on your blog, then it’s good to add a watermark to them. You can do this easily with any preferred image-editing tool or software. Some plugins are also available to add a watermark, but the outcome is usually an unclear image. Just adding a small watermark with a photo-editing tool should be enough.
If you have a watermark on each of your original images, if someone steals it, your watermark will be proof that it originally belongs to you. People are scared to steal watermarked artwork anyway.
The correct way for anyone to use your original images is to source and link them back to your website. The image below shows how a website has rightfully given credit to the original source of the photos used.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Another thing you’ll need to protect your images from copyrighting your blog further is image hotlinking. This means someone can use your images and embed the image through a link to your original file from your server. Every time their page loads, it will use your server resources for loading the image.
To avoid hotlinking issues, you can use an added plugin or tool. If you use a tool like Cloudfare, for instance, you can enable its hotlinking protection. Other plugins also offer hotlinking protection, such as the All In One WP Security and Firewall.
5. Trademark Your Blog Name
If your blog starts getting good traction, then you can consider trademarking your blog name. This is part of the process to copyright your blog. The copyright notice protects your content, while the trademark protects your blog or brand name.
Once your blog name is trademarked, you will be safe from anybody creating a website with the same name as yours. But to begin with, your blog trademark will not be accepted if it’s too similar to another existing website name. But if you have a unique name that’s not been taken yet, you can get it trademarked and make it into your property that nobody can steal.
6. Take Legal Action For Copyright Infringement
Let’s say you have taken all the steps mentioned above to copyright your blog. Now you find out that someone is already stealing or using your content without your permission.
You can take the first step by sending them a warning via email. Let the site owner know that your content is protected and using it without attributing it to you is not allowed. Request them to take it down from their website. In most cases, a simple nudge like this is enough to get the other party back off.
But if they persist in using your content and don’t respond to you, then you’ll need to move to the next step, and that is, drafting a desist letter and sending it to them. The letter will highlight the copyright infringement they are doing. Getting a lawyer to draft and send the letter instead of doing it yourself will put more force in it.
If your blog is built on Strikingly, we have a Copyright Infringement Policy to help our users protect their content. If someone is using your content that you haven’t authorized them to use, you’ll need to get in touch with a lawyer to understand your obligations and rights better under our DMCA rule as well as other laws and policies.
If you don’t get a response from the owner or admin of the website copying your content after sending them an email, you can send a signed notice of infringement to one of our DMCA agents by mail or fax.
Writers who produce original content are very passionate about their blogs and articles. It is not suitable for anybody to start using your content without giving the original writer the deserved credit. Therefore, if you are running a blog with original content, you must copyright your blog. It is easier to prevent theft than dealing with copyright infringement issues once you find out that your content is being stolen.
At Strikingly, we use all the measures that we can to protect the rights of our users. But we can only help you in these matters if you are willing to help yourself first. We highly recommend all our users use the copyright notice. There’s one by default in most of our website templates, create a Terms & Conditions page with a clearly stated copyright policy, and trademark your blog name to copyright your blog.
