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360 Degrees of Copyright Protection
Posted: February 2, 2010 (22:23) under Copyright, Intellectual Property, Security, Theft

Rebecca Bollwitt wants you to talk nerdy to her

Copyright’s a heated topic in the internet, and one about which there is a great deal of misinformation (see this example for an adamant, strongly held, oft-repeated, and completely illegal, belief about copyright). Essentially, if you’re using a major platform such as Blogspot, WordPress, or Tumblr, or if the server hosting your site is in a country which is a signatory of the major international copyright agreements (such as Canada, the US, India, China, the UK, all EU members, etc) your post is protected by copyright the moment it is created. Yes, even before you hit Publish.

Naturally, as copyright owner you are entitled to sell various subsidiary or even All Rights to your work as you please. Sadly, that doesn’t always mean you can relax, as Vancouver blogger Rebecca Bollwitt, known as Miss604, found out.

What happened was this: Miss604 signed a contract with Tourism Vancouver to supply posts for their site. One of those posts suddenly showed up on NBC’s site, contrary to the exclusivity contract in the Tourism Vancouver contract, which was binding on both sides. When Rebecca complained, NBC removed her name from the post, but keeping the content up, as you can see by her tweet above. When this hit the thunderdome of teh intarwebs, meaning Miss604′s thousands of followers on Twitter, and their followers, and all of their blogs, NBC reinstated her name, in a tiny font, with no link. It’s unclear what position Tourism Vancouver takes in all of this; whether they gave NBC the right to repost the content in contravention of the contract is still not clarified, but all parties involved now consider the matter resolved.

If Tourism Vancouver had taken down the post from its site, which sometimes happens in these disputes when companies want to stay “out of the fray,” it would have been difficult for Rebecca to prove her case to NBC or the public, as she’d have had no objective proof that it was her content which had been copied. This is yet another reason that keeping a backup of all your work (and writing that into your contract) preferably at a neutral third party’s office or site is critical to anyone who makes a living from intellectual property. Can you ever have too many?