Blogs, copyright, and keeping your nose clean - Mari Biella
If you’re reading these words, there’s a very good chance that you’re a writer. In these days of PoD, digital publishing, and free and instantly-available blogs, there’s also a good chance that you’re published in some form or another. Do you, like most writers, assert your copyright? Or do you distribute your works under the Creative Commons licence? Image credit: Xander | Wikimedia Commons If you assert your own copyright, do you respect other people’s? It’s a question worth thinking about. You can’t consistently both assert your copyright and flout other people’s, and yet some writers do. (If, on the other hand, you’re on a crusade against the very notion of copyright, then you can at least disregard copyright and do so consistently. For legal reasons, I don’t recommend it.) There seem to be two basic strands of thought concerning copyright issues: 1) copyright must be respected and breach of copyright is theft; and, 2) copyright is an out-of-date and often u...