Publishing copyrighted materials in blogs

Copy-righted or Copy-wronged?

X: Can I publish copyrighted materials in my blog?

Y: No, you can’t. But if you can manage to get the permission from author/ publisher, you can.

X: But I am ready to give the author his due credit! I am not selling it or using it for commercial purpose…I am rather helping the author to promote his work!

Y:  Nope! The author hasn’t asked you for free ads, has he? Don’t assume he wants this promotion.

X: WTF?! But I liked this poetry so much that I want to put it on my blog!

Y: Well, you are free to include a part of it under fair dealing or fair use as your own view or comment on the authors’ work.

In my previous post, I posted Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden. I was tempted to quote the entire poetry text in my post (with all the due credit to the poet and the publisher), but went to check if I was infringing any copyright unknowingly.

Glad that I did it!

I stumbled upon a site where this poetry text was removed by saying “Unfortunately this poem has been removed from our archives at the insistence of the copyright holder”. I don’t know what insisted the publisher to do so; perhaps because the website was commercial (it carried ads). But then there were several other websites and blogs with the same poetry text, and many of them were supported by google ads etc. I decided to investigate it further.

I found a very interesting explanation about copyright protection. This article is free from legal jargon and is suitable for anyone who wants to get it simple. If you want to understand the issue from a more legal viewpoint, go on and read 10 Big Myths about copyright.

Say, if you were ever to comment on a film or computer game, and if you need uploading a clip/ trailer of it, do you think that you might face any legal problems? No! Not really. Under fair dealing or fair use if we are commenting, criticizing, reviewing, teaching or researching a copyrighted work, we can make use of some limited work like – including a clip form a film while criticizing it or quoting excerpts from any writing etc. We can post game screen shots, videos etc under the same law.

Disclaimer: I am not a legal expert and have a very common man’s perspective on the issue. Copyright is a very complicated and sensitive matter. I am discussing the common dilemma an average bloger faces with copyrighted materials.  I am still recovering the shock that I got after learning that, legally “Copyright” and © are same, but both are different from (C). What a headache!