If websites are the modern day store front, blogs are the smiling faces that greet you from behind the counter. The posts you spend hours crafting are marketing tools for your creative business as well as creative works in their own right. Copyright protection for blogs is especially critical if you are using your posts to debut your creative work—whether you are a writer, an artist, a photographer, or an entrepreneur. Protection is also important to maintain a competitive advantage for your business.
To protect blog posts efficiently, you as the author must treat them as unpublished work. It sounds counterintuitive, I know. Especially when the button you hit when you've finished writing the post says, "Publish." Bear with me as we unpack this idea because it is an important concept.
If your posts are unpublished, you will be able to file one application with the Copyright Office covering more than one post but only have to pay only one filing fee. When you design and operate your blog with this in mind, copyright protection for blogs can be efficient, effective, and affordable.
The Two Parts of Copyright Protection for Blogs
There are two pieces of the puzzle when it comes to copyright protection for blogs. The first is the structural piece—the set up of your website itself: language in the terms of use, the choice of social sharing buttons, and the RSS feed. The structural piece lays the groundwork for the legal piece which is filing the application for copyright registration.
The first piece is foundational and only needs to be done once. The second piece is something you will do regularly as part of your work flow.
Protecting Blogs Posts with Website Terms of Use
It's up to you to distinguish your blog posts as unpublished as opposed to published. The Copyright Office generally is not going to challenge what you tell them unless there is glaring evidence to the contrary on your site or in your deposit copy.
Your job is to eliminate any glaring contradiction about whether your posts are published. One place to do that is in the terms of use for your website. Here is some language you can include in your site's terms of use to clarify the unpublished status of your posts:
Suggested Terms of Use Language
Unless otherwise indicated, the content on this site is unpublished and not for sale. You may link to and briefly quote the content on this site. Links to the content or brief quotes from the content on this site posted on social networks or elsewhere are not to be construed as publication.
You must not:
- Publish material from this website without prior written consent.
- Sell or rent material from this website.
- Reproduce, duplicate, download, create derivatives, copy or otherwise exploit material on this website for any purpose.
- Redistribute any content from this website, including onto another website.
Put Slight Limits on Post Sharing
We all know that sharing is caring, but oversharing can lead to holes in an otherwise tightly crafted strategy of copyright protection for blogs.
Specifically, do not use an email sharing icon that populates the email with a complete copy of the post. Set the email icon up so that your reader is only sending a link back to the post. By setting it up this way, you are not authorizing the distribution of a full copy of your work.
Don't include a print icon on your posts. You can't control when someone will right-click and print (unless you disable right-click on your site which is completely annoying). But by not encouraging your audience to print your posts, you are reinforcing the characterization of the posts as unpublished.
Customize the RSS Feed from Your Website
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Essentially, RSS can deliver an entire copy of your post to a reader's feed without the reader ever having to visit your again. There are many blog readers who prefer to read posts this way.
Limiting the RSS distribution of your post to a summary instead of the full post provides two concrete benefits:
- First, for purposes of copyright protection for blogs, limiting RSS to a summary of the post means you are not authorizing further distribution of your post which is consistent with the notion that the post is unpublished.
- Second, when the RSS is a summary, you increase the chances that the reader will actually visit your website to read the full post. A full post RSS feed undermines the goal of driving traffic to your site.
You do not need to know much about how RSS works in order to effectively control it. For instance, this site is built on WordPress (.org not .com). In order to limit the syndication to summaries of the post in WordPress, the reading setting can be adjusted from the dashboard. It looks like this:
A simple toggle from "full text" to "summary" does the trick.
Why Unpublished Posts are Important for this Protection Strategy
Here's the thing about applications for copyright registration—whether and when the work has been published figures into the calculation of what it's going to cost to make the filing. A separate application is needed for each date of publication.
It costs $35 to file a single application for copyright registration. If you write and publish a post each week, it will cost you $1,820 over the course of a year in filing fees alone. That is not economically realistic for most bloggers.
Publication, in the copyright sense of the word, means making a creative work (in this instance, a blog post) available for sale or further distribution. Public display does not mean the work has been published.
This is a direct quote from the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices:
It may seem odd that allowing the whole world to view or hear a work does not constitute publication of a work, but the statutory definition is clear that the public performance or public display of a work does not, in and of itself, constitute publication. A mere display or performance is not a distribution, because the end user does not retain a “copy” or “phonorecord” of the work, as defined under the Copyright Act.
Sharing a link to a post on Facebook or Twitter does not create a copy or authorize a further distribution or download. Rather it sends someone who clicks on that link back to the original where the post is displayed. So there's no publication.
Filing Requirements for Copyright Protection for Blogs
With the structural pieces in place on your website, you are ready to file a standard application for copyright registration of your posts as an unpublished collection. The single application cannot be used to register an unpublished collection. Nor are unpublished blog posts registered using a group registration form or a serial registration form.
You must use the standard application to register an unpublished collection of blog posts.
All of the posts must have been written by the same author, or if they were written by multiple authors, at least one of the authors must have contributed to each post. There is no limit to the number of posts that may be registered using the unpublished collection option.
The copyright claimant for all of the posts must be the same person or organization. For instance, you may be the author of all the posts and your LLC, or company, might be the claimant. The claimant is either the author of the work or a person or organization that owns all the rights that initially belonged to the author.
Give your collection of posts a descriptive title: "Creative Law Center blog posts 2018" for example. In the contents title field, put the title of each post.
When filling out the online application, on the certification screen, there is a place to leave a note for the registration specialist. This is where you need to tell the Copyright Office that you are registering a number of works (the posts) as an unpublished collection. If there is a question about the unpublished status of the posts, you can point to each of the three structural features you put in place to establish that the posts are unpublished.
A Final Note
Remember not to include any reader comments in the deposit copy you upload. A comment is creative content owned by the person who wrote it. The owner of the blog does not have copyright ownership over comments they did not write.
This strategy provides you with copyright protection for blogs that is efficient, affordable, and effective. If you have any questions, drop in a comment below.
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Hi the blog is awesome and very useful thanks for sharing, Copyright protection is conferred on all Unique fictional, artistic, musical or dramatic, cinematograph and sound soundtrack works. VSK & Co is a Full-service law firm in the Copyright Registration and well experienced with IPR Consultation, offering discussion and legal assistance. Cinematographic movies, as well as sound track and video films, and recordings on discs, tapes, perforated roll or other devices are covered by copyrights.
Hello Kathryn,
Great words, and thanks for the advice! If the recommended advice is to file registration quarterly, that means roughly $35/quarter for blog posts? If so, do you recommend https://creativecommons.org/ or so other site for a cheaper means to protect work? I’m new in blogging, and I just don’t want to lose my fiction writing to someone!
Thank you so much,
Best,
John
John,
This post needs to be updated. The Copyright Office now has a form for Short Online Literary Works (https://www.copyright.gov/grtx/) specifically designed to protect blog posts. Much more economical. We offered a workshop with Jonathan Bailey on exactly how the form works. You can get the replay here: Copyright Protection for Short Online Literary Works [Replay].
Hello Kathryn,
Thank you for your reply, and I will check out the form and the workshop, too!
All the best,
John
i found your content very helpful.
I am in UK. Where would I have to file an application to register a blog as ‘unpublished’?
Would the placement of the content behind a paywall qualify as ‘publishing’?
“Unless otherwise indicated, the content on this site is unpublished and not for sale.”
Since the application (WordPress/Blogger/etc) you’re using to post blog entries actually includes the word “publish” on the radio button you click to get it on the net…and since you agreed to “terms of use” from the company that created the app in order to utilize it…isn’t the blog entry legally-classified as “published”?
Also, by listing the blog entries as “unpublished”is the author protected from potential libel claims for the articles (not in your case, of course, but as a general rule) , since libel is restricted to “published” material?
Thanks in advance,
Brian
Publication has a technical meaning in copyright law. According to the statute, “Publication is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.” In defamation law, “published” has yet another meaning — communicating the defamatory statement to a third person. WordPress uses “publish” to mean the post is ready to display to the world. Display of a creative work, without more, does not constitute publication in the copyright sense. An “unpublished” (in the copyright sense) blog post that is otherwise displayed to the world will not protect the content creator from liability for defamation.
It’s a great question. Three different meanings for the word “published” depending upon context.
Hi Kathryn,
Wow! This was another power packed blog with information that so many writers can use and need to know. I really appreciate how you take your precious time to share your valuable knowledge. You are truly a gem!
By the way, since I reside in your area, hopefully as I write and develop my projects, I will be able to utilize your services in my writing career.
Again, thanks for sharing the information! Looking forward to more.
Debbie
I’m glad you liked the post, Debbie. I look forward to helping you with your writing career when you’re ready. It’s nice that you live in my area, but because copyright law is federal and not state-based, I can help folks across the country and even internationally.
Using your example above of “Creative Law Center blog posts 2018” at the end of 2018 once all the posts have been written? And, if so doesn’t that mean they are unprotected for an entire year? Or, do you file at the beginning to cover post not yet written?
You cannot file for a registration on posts that have not yet been written. The recommended practice is to file quarterly. “Creative Law Center Blog Posts Spring 2018” would have been a better title.
Great question. Thanks for letting me clarify.