Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9
But there are millions and millions of blogs out there now. If you want to grow yours, you have to
outrun at least some of the other bloggers, even if only by a little bit. Adding media to your blog is
one of the very best ways to do it.
You might already be a media expert from other web work, or even have a blog focused largely on
media. If so, this chapter will be of moderate interest to you. We're really writing this for the
authors of traditional, word-led blogs—those of you who want to spice up your blog a bit, but are
not quite sure how. We're here to help.
Copyright and Media Types
Copyright laws and enforcement are much tighter for graphics, audio, and video than for words.
Most bloggers are, unfortunately, rather casual about copyright laws and regulations. However, the
rules are confusing enough, and enforcement lax and haphazard enough, that this is understandable.
Everything put on the open Web is, thereby, made public. However, it's made public for display
within the site that displays it
. You can always link to a site to make something available to your
users. (Although “deep linking” within a site, such as what Google News does with news stories,
has been the subject of lawsuits, the owners of the targeted sites haven't prevailed to date.)
However, there are various rules about how much you can copy from someone else's site to yours,
and about how much you have to credit the source if you do.
Just to show how sensitive the topic is, we need to state, for our own protection and our pub-
lisher's, that nothing in this section is meant to be taken as legal advice. You should discuss any
concerns with an appropriately qualified legal resource before making decisions with relation to
copyright law.
In most cases, you're allowed to copy a few lines of text, with a reference to the source. (You don't
have to include a hyperlink; it's nice, though, and helpful to your site visitors, to do so if you can.)
You can copy more text if you're doing so for educational use or for the purposes of criticizing. All
the important words in that sentence have wiggle room in them, though: “more” text, “educational
use,” “purposes of criticizing.” Satire is sometimes thought to be a particularly safe rationale for
copying more than a couple of lines of text.
It's also true that enforcement often depends on the effect of your copying: A site that copies large
expanses of a new book for the purpose of praising it to the skies might be less likely to get a
lawyer letter than one that copies the same amount of text to condemn it! Enforcement also tends
to be stricter when something is used for profit (as in a printed book that's available for sale) than
not for profit, partly because nonprofit use lends itself more readily to claims that the purpose was
solely educational or critical rather than for monetary gain, partly for the practical reason that it's
harder to win or recover damages when there's no visible income.
Compared with “mere” words, copyright law is stricter with regard to poetry, song lyrics, music,
and video, in all of which even a few words or a few seconds of content can be considered pro-
tected. (This is not exactly a compliment to we bloggers who use plain old text, is it?) People have
been successfully sued for including just a few lines of lyrics in a printed book, for instance.
Be careful with regard to copyright. You can search online for guidance that's more detailed and
authoritative than offered here, or consult legal counsel if needed. If you're not careful, in addition
to the risk of enforcement action and penalties, you risk leaving a poor impression with your blog
