Is this copyright infringement?
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If someone takes a paragraph from one of my blog posts and they give me credit on their blog, but they do all of this without my permission, do I have a case against them? Do I have a case against them if I tell them to take it down and they don’t?
If they take one of my commenter’s comments and place it on their blog IN FULL giving them credit, again without the commenter’s permission, does he/she have a case against the copyright infringer?
I read the wordpress.com TOS in full and the documents liked to it, but it didn’t answer my question.
Thank you in advance for any opinions.
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I am not an attorney or anything but I think that a problem did not occur until after you asked them to take it down and they failed to do so. I do not know about having a case to go sue them, but that seems like it breaking some sort of copyright law.
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Is the situation as you describe it copyright infringement? Yes.
Do you have a case against them? Yes…but only if you want to spend a fortune on a intellectual property / copyright attorney and take them to federal court…where your case would probably be thrown out because it’s not a big enough deal.
People think they’re not stealing your intellectual property as long as they give “credit” to the source, but that’s not the way the law reads…they still need permission. In writing.
Of course the copyright law is vague…very vague…and the waters are clouded by the “doctrine of fair use”…which does allow unauthorized reproduction of a certain amount of your text.
How much? No one seems to know. It’s a case-by-case basis.
In your case, I say it’s copyright infringement…but so what? If they refuse to comply with your wishes and take down your text, there’s probably nothing that can be done about it.
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One thing I always suggest is to have a clear copyright statement on your blog stating that all rights are reserved and that nothing on the blog can be used without your permission. It should be stated in a legal type of way, I was just paraphrasing. It isn’t totally necessary, but it is another thing in your favor.
You can always contact their web host who may or may not ask for a DMCA violation notice, but in the email to them make sure and include all the details including links to the image on your blog and to the site that took it.
Do a “whois” search to find out the name and contact information for their web host.
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There’s some info here that will answer some of your questions. Also google “copyright myths”.
In general, a correctly worded DMCA takedown or cease-and-desist notice sent to the right person has something like an 80% chance of succeeding. If the web site is hosted in eastern Europe or China, roughly 0%.
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Maybe I’m less sensitive than virgomonkey, but if someone quotes one paragraph of mine and gives me credit, and a link, it doesn’t bother me at all. It doesn’t cost me anything, and it usually gets me some traffic. That’s the usual attitude I see. But if it really bothers you, send a formal cease and desist letter. If it really really bothers you because your content is that valuable to you, then you ought to reconsider whether that material should be posted on the internet.
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I’m with you Curmudgeon — if I am quoted and credited I am flattered and I too do usually get traffic from it so that’s just another plus.
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Thanks for the above information.
Does WordPress.com delete any blogs that fail to comply with my requests to take down the snippets of my posts or the full wording of my commenters? The blog in question is a wordpress.com blog.
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Interesting post, Virgomonkey. I’d always assumed that a short quote, if properly attributed, fell under the “reasonable use” part of copyright law, same as if you quoted an excerpt from a book as part of a book review or discussion. Was the excerpt misleading? Does it give a false impression of what you’d said, taken out of context? And has the person responded at all to your requests?
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Think of it this way: when you write an essay about Shakespeare, do you quote Shakespeare? Of course you do, but not more than a paragraph at a time. Fair use is a fuzzy concept, but generally speaking quotation on that kind of scale is not theft. Look at BoingBoing.net, one of the top five blogs in the world; virtually everything they post is from somewhere else, buttressed by a paragraph from the original source.
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“Does WordPress.com delete any blogs that fail to comply with my requests to take down the snippets of my posts or the full wording of my commenters? The blog in question is a wordpress.com blog. “
No.
We will ask to see the original url and the other url.
If we decide to intervene we will place a note in the blog for the blog owner to talk to us.
We then see where we go from there.But just delete a blog as you say? No, not at all.
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I also always advise the person of who is complaing.
I note that you quote from other sources…
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Yes, I quote from other sources, but nobody has told me to take anything down.
Thank you, all, for taking the time to answer my questions. It was all very helpful to me. There are actually more complexities to the story that I have left out, but I just mainly wanted to get directly to the point here to avoid a huge cobweb.
Thank you, once again. Especially you, Mark. You have always been such a huge help for me!
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