If you have a blog website and run it professionally, there is no doubt that you would be publishing original content on it. After all, it is not a walk in the park to produce professional content from time to time. You may even hire a professional blog writer and even he/she will run out of blog ideas at some point. However, in today’s day and age, it is even important to protect your website content rather than gather new blog ideas. Therefore, you must understand how to copyright a blog and ensure the long-term protection of your content.
If you are working for any blog-related organization, you must know how to copyright your blog and protect your company’s brand image. As much information is available on the internet, copyright infringement has become popular across many companies. In the online world, where the competition is increasing every day, it has become more of a necessity for content creators to integrate and enforce a privacy policy related to their content.
Importance of Blog Copyright
Nowadays, all bloggers must understand that when they build a blog on a platform like WordPress, they are automatically given copyright. Such platforms provide integrated copyright to satisfy the demands of the website owner. It means anyone who wants to get your content must get your permission. However, it doesn’t mean you are completely done with your content protection. Some individuals attempt to steal your content, which may hamper your blog copyright objectives.
The best thing to do as a blogger is take all the necessary steps to copyright your blog. Even though it may look time-consuming, it is worth the investment rather than seeing all your hard work getting no value just because your content is found on some other website. By having copyright for your blogs, you can have proof to show full ownership of your written content. If anyone tries to copy your content, you can take legal action against them.
Strategies to Copyright a Blog
1. Copyright Notice
Many website-building platforms worldwide come with an integrated copyright notice. The modifications within this notice are the first step in your goal to copyright your blog. For example, if you look at free website builders like Strikingly, it allows you to create professional websites without breaking a sweat. However, the most important thing is that all the website templates we have provided are already equipped with copyright notice. When you click on the copyright notice shared on the website, it will open the entire content regarding the website’s privacy policy, as shown below.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
By adding content to your website template, you can change the default blog name that is initially part of your copyright policy. The most common way of doing this is by modifying your footer settings because this copyright is usually part of the website footer. It is good to keep your blog's copyright as short as possible.
2. Terms and Conditions
When discussing a particular copyright policy, it is not just about settling for good enough policies. As a person from the online community, you must understand that it is not just about steps to copyright your blog. It is about doing something even more. It is not about fending off people who want to steal your content. It is also about making sure that they don’t return to your platform. The best way to do it is by including terms and conditions in the final section of your website.
As a website owner, you may have the feeling that creating a terms and conditions page would be a technical task. However, today’s day and age, it has become a straightforward task because many website themes have a ready-made terms and conditions page template or can be integrated via tools with a single click. Formswift and Termsfeed are basic examples of the Terms of Use policy. Once you enter basic information through these tools, the page will be created automatically.
3. Registration
By default, any individual who has created original website content has the right to secure a copyright for blogs. For example, you have triggered copyright infringement for some reason, and you want to take legal action. In that case, you must copyright your blogs individually and secure your content.
4. Protect Blog Images
If you want to copyright your blog, you can add a watermark to all the added website images as part of your website content. You can perform this task efficiently through any image-editing tool or software which you can find on the Internet. There are certainly available plugins for blog copyright that add a watermark to the images. However, it reduces the quality of those images and makes them blur. Therefore, you can just add a small watermark through the available photo-editing tools.
If you have a watermark on your blog images and some individual steals it, you will at least have proof that the watermark belongs to you only. In today’s day and age, people are afraid of stealing watermark artwork anyway. The best strategy for anyone to use original images is to source and link them back to your site. Another thing you need to protect your images from getting copyrighted is image hotlinking. It means that an individual can use your images and embed them via a link to your original file from the server.
5. Trademark Blog Name
If your blog is extremely attractive to your target audience, you must understand that it also has negative consequences. Therefore, you must consider trademarking your blog name as part of the process to copyright your blog. As we have discussed before, copyright notice holds the responsibility of protecting your content. On the other hand, the trademark protects your blog or brand name. By having a copyright for blogs, you can ensure that none of the individuals can steal your content.
Once you have a blog name trademarked, not only you can secure your website content, but no one will be able to build a blog website with the same name as yours. However, it is essential to note that your blog trademark will be rejected if it has a similar website name as the existing one. However, if you have a unique name that is yet to be taken, you can create a trademark and make it a property that no one can steal from you. The best practice for this is to create a list of blog names and narrow it down until a few blog names are left.
6. Legal Action for Copyright Infringement
When you go through a tutorial on how to copyright your blog, you will realize that the most crucial step of this procedure is the one that comes at the tail-end. When you have completed all the steps (mentioned above), you may find out that a particular individual is already trying to steal your content without your permission. The best way to alert them is to send them a warning through email. You can inform them about your copyright and also about the fact that any attributions within your content are not allowed. Make sure you have a professional working email so they don’t raise questions about your work.
As a website owner, you can request them not to interfere with your work. Usually, a simple shrug is enough to make the external party back off. However, if they continue to persist with their illegal activities and don’t respond to you, you must draft a desist letter and send it to them immediately.
Build a Blog Website on Strikingly
If you want to know how to copyright your blog; you must look into some of the most fundamental website builders to rely on, such as Strikingly. Strikingly provides you with all the necessities to create a professional blog website. We provide its users with a high-quality compilation of website templates that can be easily customized as per your business niche idea. Most importantly, you should know that whatever website template you choose regarding your blog website, all of them have an integrated copyright notice.
Therefore, whatever website content you add to your blog website is already part of the security policy. You can create categories of your website content to fulfill the demands of your respective visitors. Once the customers know about the originality and professionalism in your content, there is no reason why they won’t return to your website again and increase their knowledge through your blogs. Even if you have an eCommerce website, you can tend to include a blog section and display original content to support your eCommerce products.
Conclusion
Writers that produce original content have a lot of passion for blogs and article writing. If you are one of those, you shouldn’t just be about generating new blog ideas, and you should also understand the technicalities of copyrighting your blog for content protection purposes. Therefore, you must obtain blog copyright when trying to publish original content.
Strikingly has all the necessities to protect the user rights related to their website content. However, we can only help you if you are trying to help yourself in this process. We recommend you make full use of our built-in copyright notice, which we provide you alongside our collection of website templates. You must create a terms and conditions web page with a clearly defined privacy policy. This will also help you to trademark your blog name.
