Last week, my mom shared her 1st Blog Paws conference experience. She shared that one of the session she attended was about Copyright. The session was presented by Paul C Jorgensen, a DC intellectual property lawyer and the owner of a pug named Sloppy Joe. With the high cost of lawyer fees, attending the session provided my mom a free 45 minute consultation.

For sure you are proud and very protective of your blog content. It is unfair for someone to copy your work. In October 2010, we found out several of our blog content/photos were copied.  We did several posts about it but there are new aspects that have changed. Thus, we continue to educate ourselves about copyright as blogging becomes more popular.

Copyright means protecting any of your original expressions that exists in a tangible format.
For example: written work, photography, designs/art, and video/music.
Mr. Jorgensen clarified that ideas, lists and facts are not protected by copyright.
In our case as bloggers, once you post a content it is automatically copyright protected.
Keep In Mind: You own the copyright to your content once it is fixed in a tangible form.

Many of the blogs we visit have taken protective measures. One thing to protect your blog is to place a copyright notice on your blog. We’ve seen blogs have Terms of Use which is a useful way to let visitors/readers beware of reusing content/photos. © small circle with the letter c is the copyright symbol. We learned that whether or not you display ©, your work is still protected under copyright law. For added awareness we often use the copyright symbol.
After being having our content copied, we added a copyright notice to every post. We stopped adding a copyright notice after a year but have been re-thinking of doing it again. We feel having a copyright on the side bar and footer is enough but to take extra precautions we plan to do a separate copyright policy page, which we recommend for everyone.

Here’s a snippet of Do’s to Protect Your Blog Content

1) Educate yourself about blog copyright.
2) Add a copyright notice and/or terms of use page to your blog.
3) Make your RSS feed short. Add a copyright statement on the bottom of your feed which prevents others from stealing your content via RSS feeds.
4) Set Google alerts of phrases that you use often on your blog/content.
5) Protect your photos with a watermark. Also, make sure to properly name your photos on your blog. We suggest not to link to your media file.

Mr. Jorgensen did not discussed 3) and 4) in his session.
We learned these important do’s from reading about blog copyright.
If you have any questions, just send us an email.

Many of you have noticed our watermarks on our photos and asked us how we do it. 2011 is when we started placing watermarks on our photos. We change it every year. One thing we want to remind everyone is to rename your photos when you upload/post on your blog. It will help out especially when you want to track it. We often use TinyEye. Check it out!

For those of you who want to create watermarks on your photos, here’s a tutorial.
We typically do it on Photoshop but a free photo editing PicMonkey comes in very handy.

How To Create a Photo Watermark

There’s 2 options
1) Create it ONCE which means you have to make the watermark every time you upload a photo and post it on your blog. We don’t recommend doing this. Check out PicMarkr if you wish to use this option.

2) Create a permanent watermark and add it as an overlay on your photo.
We will show you how to do this using PicMonkey.

a) Go to PicMonkey. Select Collage. Remove the 2 cells on the right.
b) Select the Paint Tray icon on the right side. Click on transparent background then Save it.

c) Go to PicMonkey’s main page then Select Photo.
Upload the transparent background you saved.
d) Select the Text icon. Type © + desired text. Use the default text color.
It’s important for you to make the text the size you want so the watermark doesn’t need to be adjusted when added to your photos. It will keep it looking professional.
If you wish to add an object, select the overlay icon.
e) Crop the watermark you created then save it.

How To Apply your watermark to your photo
1) Go to PicMonkey. Select Photo.
2) Upload your photo.
3) Select the Overlay icon. Click on Your Own. Upload your watermark.
4) Place your watermark on your photo. Best place is on the lower right or left side.
5) You can change the color if you wish. Then Save it.

Hope this post was helpful.
Lots of Golden L♥VE n Woofs
SUGAR