Do you include a copyright notice?
Tuesday June 23, 2009
One of the interesting things about copyright law is that when you create something, you own the copyright immediately unless you expressly give it away (or are creating a work for hire, which means you gave it away before you wrote it). Including the words "Copyright © 2009 - Jennifer Kyrnin" doesn't prevent people from copying your work and if you leave them off, that doesn't mean your work is free for the taking (FAQ: If something doesn't have a copyright notice, can it be copied?). I just read any article on Position Absolute that complains about the copyright notices because they are "lost bandwidth" on every site he visits with his iPhone. Copyright on the Web is very confusing for people, and since I make money from my writing on the Web, I would rather see the notice than not. Yes, it's true that the copyright notice doesn't stop everyone from stealing content. But it stops some people, and that's one less person I have to go after and fight the copyright violation. What do you think, do you include a copyright notice?
I always include a copyright notice on all sites I create. Not only do I include a simple notice, I also have a link to a more detailed copyright explanation page: http://www.martinish.com/about/copyright.
I always do. Like you said, if it saves you even 1 less fight over content ownership it’s worth it.
Not always, If we will not include copyright notice, then what type of problems arise.
Talking of adding things why is it that articles on web sites are rarely dated ? I was reading a useful article on stretching backgrounds here and it mentioned that at the present time the CSS3 was not supported. Without a date this sort of statement is meaningless and no-one can tell how old the article is.
I (always) use a copyright notice, just for the ignorant ones out there (or otherwise called, the majority, at least from my observations), to remind them that copying is not permitted and there is a law to back it up.
MH: regarding your question about dates.
While the example you gave is a good place to include a date, the majority of the articles that I write are still valid information even years after they were written.
But when About.com used to require dates on all the articles, they found in user studies that people saw dates of articles that were more than even a couple months old and assumed they were out of date. Even if they were something timeless.
For example, the second article I ever wrote for About.com is just as valid today as it was in 1997, when I wrote it. But if I put a date on it, many people would stop at the date saying “this article is nearly 12 years old! It can’t be right.”
Personally, I try to write articles that are timeless, and for those that I write with changing features I update periodically. Yes, that means that sometimes you’ll catch something saying that “modern browsers don’t support this” when IE 8 does support it now or something like that. But the majority of my articles don’t have that problem, and putting a date on them would just imply that they were wrong simply because they are old.
I do date articles that have a pre-determined shelf-life, like reviews or articles about events or other things.
I’ve always wondered about online copyrights. I’ve been through the process of copyrighting music and even an artistic piece but never something that consistently changes. How would you ever file for a copyright with something that changes hourly, daily, weekly, yearly?
I was just reading an article that is about this very issue. This designer got (essentially) his entire site design ripped off, by another design company. He published his conversation with an intellectual rights attorney, and while it’s not official legal advice, a lot of it makes sense:
http://astuteo.com/blog/article/stolen_website_design/