Business Blog Wire

At her About.com guide to blogging, Sheila Ann Manuel Coggins offers basic copyright advice and a few great links to help you understand the legal issues surrounding blogging and copyright.  This is a good resource for businesss bloggers.  (Sheila also has published a related article that you should check out; it gives 14 copyright tips for bloggers.)  Knowing the legalities of copyrights will help you form a great corporate blogging policy and overcome blogging problems.

My top three points on copyrights and blogging:

1.  Always ask permission.  Ask someone if it’s okay with them if you copy their stuff (images, text, video, etc.) - BEFORE you do it!  (Unless a huge neon sign tells you in boldface letters that it’s okay.  Even then, you should probably ask, just to be safe.)

2. Always say thanks.  Whenever you post an image on your corporate blog that you got from somewhere else on the Web, you should provide an acknowledgement linking to the source or author of that image.  For example, "Photo courtesy of Joe Spivey," with a link to John’s website.  Same goes for text or any other material.

3. Don’t be stupid.  I’m sorry, but we all need this basic principle affixed to the walls of our minds.  Don’t secretly copy a competitor’s logo and mock it on your company blog.  Don’t copy entire articles from another website without acknowledging the source.  Don’t wear black and brown together.

Excellent blogging/copyright links:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes tons of great information about bloggers’ rights.  Get up, stand up!

The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is the result of a collaborative effort by several excellent law schools and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to report on the silencing effects that many "stop or we’ll shoot" legal threats have on business bloggers.  You can learn about your real rights thanks to the CEC.

Bonus link: On its "about" page, the CEC offers seeral more great blogging law links.

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