Intellectual property
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Hello, my question concerns the rights to what I will uplodad on wordpress. As I am an aspiring writer, I would like to be sure that whatever I publish on wordpress remains my intellectual property, so that I can eventually try to publish it later on.
I fully understand that any content can be reblogged, but my main concern is being sure that if I were to try to publish whatever I posted on wordpress that I would have no legal issues doing so.
Anyone have the answer to this? I’m not really sure that I fully understand the legal aspects of the terms and conditions.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there.
If you read through the Terms of Service you’ll see that all copyright for all original content you post on WordPress.com remains entirely yours. You give WordPress.com the right to publish that content in RSS feeds and via reblogging, but ownership of the content will always belong to you. And in fact, if other bloggers copy your content without attribution or permission, WordPress.com has a very good track record of removing that content should you file a DMCA takedown request, so they actually help to protect your intellectual rights in this way.
As for publication, while you won’t have legal issues with WordPress.com, your publisher might have issues with previously published work. Some publishers demand first publication rights. That means they won’t publish something that’s already published online. Other publishers don’t mind. But that’s something for you, your agent and your publisher to sort out. Republishing something originally published on WordPress.com is perfectly fine, from WP.com’s point of view, as you own the content and can do with it what you want.
Also see these links for more information:
https://en.wordpress.com/tos/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/copyright-and-the-dmca/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/copyright-infringement-what-to-do/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/fair-use/ -
Hey Kokkieh,
Thanks for the detailed answer. Indeed it’s kind of what I understood by reading the terms and conditions but I wasn’t totally sure. Thanks for clearing things up and for the links!
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