As people who have worked with me know, I have “repurposed” a lot of my writing into books. The articles I have converted into books are those for which I own all the “rights.” As a writer, it’s a good idea to understand what rights you are giving away and which ones you are retaining. I’m not a lawyer, so please don’t construe this article as any type of legal advice. I’d just like to offer writers some food for thought when it comes to the rights to their work.
For example, you might write articles and put them on promotional article sites like EzineArticles. The idea is that your article is republished by others around the Internet and you get a lot of incoming links from them. Whether or not the technique works is not the issue I’m addressing. As a writer, by posting your work to those sites, what exactly have you done to your copyright?
In general, when you write something, unless you were paid in a “work for hire” agreement, you are the copyright holder. Sometimes when you write for a magazine, you may sell only your “first North American rights” or “first print rights.” Usually, you can still use the article in other media, such as online. (However, these days, most magazines and newspapers also want online rights.)
In any case, if you write an article for the many gazillion freebie article sites out there, you may be giving up all your rights completely. Many sites advertise that the articles are “copyright-free” so people can get content for nothing, as long as they include the bio with the link back to the author’s site. If that is the case, you need to realize that by posting the article, you may be throwing your rights away. If you understand that’s what you’re doing, fine. However, if you plan to reuse your writing later for something else, you should really think about whether you want to lose control of your written work.
Increasingly, questions have come up as to whether the content from these article sites can be trusted. You may be distressed to find your work posted by other people under their name with a link back to their site. You can use services like Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com) to find out if your articles have been used without your permission. If you put content online, others will plagiarize your work eventually, so it’s good to remain vigilant.
A few other tactics have appeared in the sleazy Internet Marketing world that can affect writers. New “mashup” software exists that goes out and scrapes article sites. Based on a keyword phrase, the software goes out and “scrapes” (read: steals) one or two sentences from sites all over the Internet. Then it compiles the junk together into a new article.
Along the same lines, “private label rights” or PLR articles are junky articles people can buy, which are often blatantly plagiarized or compiled from sources around the Internet. Another similar tactic is complete PLR article sites filled with a database of articles on a particular subject. Many of these articles come from the big article sites, so your articles could be included without your knowledge.
Anyone who uses your work without your permission is in violation of your copyright and you have the legal right to pursue them. However, if you have willingly given up your copyright, you may not have much of a leg to stand on. Plus, if the same article is posted all over the Internet, Google won’t show all of them in the search results. Dubbed the “duplicate content penalty” only the article on the highest ranking site will appear. Odds are good that EzineArticles has a higher page rank than your own site, so no one will ever find your peerless prose on your own Web site.
For these reasons, unlike most people, I only post articles I never intend to reuse on the big article sites. My best work is restricted to content sites we own, and is filled with copyright notices. Lazy people steal. It’s inevitable. But if they do, at least I have some legal recourse.
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