How to Use Other People's Words and Pictures On Your Blog (Without Getting Burned or Being a Jerk)

You are a good person, yes? You're kind to animals, you tip well, you say "please" and "thank you" as needed, you brush and floss, and you call your Aunt Edna every Sunday because she loves to hear from you.

This rightness of behavior and soundness of character means you are in a perfect position to react with outrage at the idea of an evil, soulless spammer ripping off your blog content to make a buck.

Or are you?

When you write something, or take a photograph, or draw a cartoon, that content is automatically yours under copyright law, whether or not you register it. You can't copyright the idea of a post about a kid having a meltdown in Target, but once you write down the story of your kid's blowup last week in the hardware aisle, your written work - the expression of the idea - is yours.

Copyright law means that the person who owns the copyright gets to decide how their stuff is used. You own your blog posts and your photos. You get to decide whether you want someone to copy them or not. For bloggers, that's good news. If someone comes along and copies your blog without your permission, it's not just bad manners, it's illegal, and there are ways to make them stop.

But what about the other side of the coin, when your use of other people's words or images without permission violates their copyright and can actually place your blog in danger?

If you've ever thought, said, or written any of the following things while working on a blog post, you may need to brush up on how copyright works:

• I love this article so much, I'm going to post it to share with all of my readers.
• I put a link to the source where I got the images, that makes it okay. It's not like I'm plagiarizing.
• I posted it because I like it, that's a compliment.
• Everyone else does it, so it must be fine.
• I'm not making any money off my blog, so it doesn't hurt anyone for me to copy this.

Whether or not you give credit, compliment it, believe you're helping the person who created it, or make any money from it has no legal relevance when determining whether you're violating someone's copyright. The same applies to other people and their words and images. In other words, copying someone's work without their permission is a violation of their legal rights. Is it as bad as when spammers do it? No. But it's impolite, and it can get you in trouble.

But I would be flattered if someone copied my post!

Great! That's fine. No one is saying you have to get a lawyer and start suing people when they copy your posts, photographs, or other materials. In fact, you can even put a Creative Commons license or some other type of statement on your blog to specify exactly what types of copying you're okay with.

When it comes to other people's work, though, it's polite to allow them to decide how they feel about it. If they don't want someone copying their work, it doesn't make them a jerk, and the burden shouldn't be on them to patrol the internet and ask people to take copies down. Especially if you've added a copyright notice to your blog, or a statement asking people not to copy your material without your permission, it would probably behoove you to show the same courtesy to others.

But I would be happy to take it down if they asked me to!

Ah yes, the ol' "Asking forgiveness is easier than getting permission" thing. Nice. Remind me not to let you near my closet, otherwise my favorite purple sweater would probably show up with a hole in it and smelling like smoke. You're the only one who can decide what kind of person you want to be. If "I'll copy your stuff without permission until you show up to complain even though I've learned that it's wrong" sounds good to you, then you're not still reading this post anyway, are you?

But what about that "fair use" thing I've heard about?

Copyright does have a principle called fair use that allows limited use of someone else's work in some circumstances. If you're critiquing their work or making something new out of it, such as a parody, or you are doing news reporting, you may be able to defend your copying as fair use if you use the smallest part of their work you need to create your own work - such as a brief excerpt from a book while reviewing it or a brief excerpt from a newspaper article in order to discuss it.

Many, many uses of other people's words and images on blogs, however, is not even close to being fair use. If you're reprinting an entire recipe, poem, joke, essay, newspaper article, cartoon, scan from a magazine or book, or photograph just to share it with your readers or enhance your post and you do not have permission, that's rarely fair use. If you're using someone else's content just to make your blog more appealing, and visitors can enjoy that content in its entirety (or close enough) without leaving your blog, the chances of that being fair use are so small as to practically be nonexistent.

(If you want to know more, check out this primer on Fair Use from some clever people at Stanford.)

Who cares about whether it's legal or ethical? You said my blog was in danger, tell me more about that!

Let's be realistic. If it's an image of a product and you're gushing about that product, very few copyright holders are going to come after you. You're basically doing unpaid work for their marketing department.

If it's anything else, first the content owner has to find it. This is a lot more likely if the content owner in question is big enough to have an IT department and lawyers - such as newspapers, record companies, and movie studios. However, even small fry such as bloggers and independent musicians have plenty of tools available to monitor the web for copies of their work.

If the owner of the content you're using finds your copy and they're nice, they may contact you directly and ask you to take it down. If they're not nice, they may go straight to your blogging site or your hosting company and file a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

So let's say there's a song whose lyrics really speak to you. You copy them into a blog post to share with your readers so they can understand how you feel. Three weeks later, you get an email from your blogging site, or your hosting company, and they have deleted the post because the owner of the song lyrics filed a complaint. If you think it won't happen to you, email me and I'll put you in touch with a friend of mine who permanently lost two blog posts when a copyright owner filed a takedown notice against her blog.

Stick it to The Man! Power to the People! I won't let the corporations step on me, I'm copying all of their stuff!

Good luck with that.

But I want my blog to be awesome without stepping on anyone's toes! What should I do?

One of the best things about blogers is how they share. When they find something cool, lovely, funny, touching, or infuriating, they want the world to take a look. I've seen tons of people blogging about how they started at Blog A, then clicked on a link to go to Blog B, and ten hours later they had been all over the Internet and it was so cool. That's the awesome part about living in the post-photocopier era. If you want to share something, you can just send people over to look at it.

But if you find something great online and you reeeeallllyy want to copy it onto your blog, you can absolutely do that as long as one of the following conditions are met:

• The work isn't under copyright anymore, or
• The copyright owner said you could.

To figure out whether the copyright on a piece of content has expired, a.k.a. it's in the public domain, you can check out this handy chart on copyright expiration dates. I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a stick than look at that chart, actually, so I just keep in mind that anything really old - the Mahābhārata, for instance - is fair game.

For content not yet in the public domain, the copyright holder has the right to authorize copies, so you can always try asking. Many people will be flattered and say yes. Or in many cases, the copyright holder may have already authorized other people to use their work by adding a statement to their blog, web site, photo, or other work that says "yes, feel free to copy it!" Usually they also say something like "as long as you link back to me," which most of us would do anyway.

Can you give me some examples?

No problem.

On Flickr, for example, many photographers have chosen to make their images available for others to use by choosing a Creative Commons license that specifies exactly how their images may be used. Use Flickr's Advanced Search and check off "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content" to find photos that the copyright owners have said you can use. You can even further specify that you're searching for a photo to use in a for-profit project, or one you can mess with. The Creative Commons page on Flickr explains what the different license terms mean.

You'll also want to watch the licensing if you're using Flickr photos with a toy like a mosaic maker or album cover generator. If the photos you're using aren't yours, make sure the photographer has given permission for others to use them.

Another photo site I like is stock.xchng. They have some photos which you have to pay for, but tons of the photos are free to use as long as you link to the photographer and also leave a comment for the photographer with a link to where you used it. When you find a photo you want to use, check the terms to make sure it isn't one of the rare photos which has some other requirement, but I've rarely run across any that even exclude commercial use.

Plenty of web cartoons can also be used. xkcd, the popular geeky web comic, has a Creative Commons license. If you see a cartoon you like, check around on the page, you might find some information about the author's preferences on copying.

YouTube or other videos are another issue. You may have run across a blog post where someone included a video, but it wouldn't load. Sometimes there's a message like "this video has been removed." Chances are, what happened is that someone who didn't own the video put it up, and then the copyright owner showed up and asked the video service to take it down.

Honestly, YouTube videos are where my selfish heart starts to get tugged between what I know is legal, what I think is right, and what I think I can get away with. YouTube embedding code, unlike copying and pasting a photograph into your blog, can be disabled across the web by a copyright owner taking one action at the host site. They don't have to run around all over the web asking individuals to remove it. It's also not like YouTube is some big secret, so I'm assuming that if someone posted a video there in 2006 and the band objects, they'd have had it taken down by now. So I admit that I err on the side of what I know is copyright infringement. The copyright owner would have every right to come after me, and that's a chance I'm taking. To be completely safe and consistent, I would only embed videos that I can tell were uploaded with the copyright owner's permission, such as Jay Smooth's amazing How to Tell People They Sound Racist.

But it's just this thing I got it in an email or saw on someone else's blog, I don't know where it came from!

Use the power of Google. Three times out of four, you can find out where something came from in under 10 minutes. (Not that Home Depot stripper pole dancing thing, that's a mystery.) If you still can't determine the ownership, just link to it somewhere else if you really want to pass it along and say that you couldn't find out who originally wrote it. That way, the infringing material is not on your blog.That's the awesome part about living in the post-photocopier era. If you want to share something, you can just send people over to look at it.

Do you have any pet peeves I should know about?

I'm glad you asked. I can't stand it when people use the phrase "courtesy of" to credit an image they don't have permission to use. How is that photo "courtesy of" that user on Flickr, or the New York Times for that matter, if you just took it?

Is that it?

As tempting as it is to just copy something onto your blog without permission from the person who created it, it's not the right thing to do, and can even get you in trouble. Links are always okay, excerpts with a link back are probably fine, but for anything else - ask first! And I promise that people are coming to your blog for your voice, not a hodgepodge of other people's.

Futher Reading

Recipe Attribution by David Lebovitz at Food Blog Alliance. David's piece is a good summary of legal guidelines combined with a discussion of community norms and expectations among people who blog about food.

(If you're a blogger, even if you never blog about food, you should probably subscribe to Food Blog Alliance immediately. Many of its posts are top notch resources for any kind of blogger.)

Bloggers Beware: Debunking Nine Copyright Myths of the Online World by Kathy Bielh on LLRX.com. Kathy offers specific explanations of the "common sense" beliefs about how copyright works and contrasts them with the way the law actually works.

In Search of Blogging Ethics - Starting Points by Gena Haskett at BlogHer.com. I always enjoy Gena's writing, and here she offers some good food for thought.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Bloggers' FAQ on Intellectual Property feels strangely scattershot to me, but you may find it useful.