Dear WordCount:
A publisher has asked me to post on his site. I agreed to one post, primarily to promote my new book, and because I like their content. But the pay is minimal, so I did not agree to become a regular contributor. Now they’ve informed me that because they love my work so much they intend to re-run it on their site, giving me “a shout out and link back” to the original on my own site.
I’m wondering how to handle this. My material is original and my site is copyrighted. I feel like they cannot repost any article in it’s entirety without permission, which I haven’t given. Is this common nowadays? Is this something you would pursue? — P.
Dear P:
The short answer to your question is unless you have a contractual agreement with this site they cannot re-post the entirety of your original work without your permission. If you haven’t given them permission to repost something, they can’t.
Fair Use
You need to find out exactly how and what they’re planning to use. Under the U.S. Copyright Act, it is within “fair use” to re-publish short quotations — say 1 or 2 paragraphs — of blogs posts or other copyrighted material. In the blogosphere, it’s accepted practice in such instances to include a link back to the original so people can click over to read the entire post on the site where it was originally published. You can read more about copyright and fair use on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers.
In some cases, bloggers and other creatives — such as photographers — encourage people to copy their work. Some use a Creative Commons license to explain exactly how other people can use their material.
But if you don’t have an agreement with the website and have copyrighted your material, it’s not OK for the site’s owner to re-run an entire post without your permission.
The Money Question
Copyright and fair use aside, this situation is also about money.
If the owner of this website is republishing your blog posts, he’s using your content for free to make money for himself.
Some writers and bloggers don’t have a problem with such arrangements, especially if the platform is big enough, or like you, they’re promoting a book, that would benefit from wider exposure. Huffington Post is a master of this. Authors, actors and other people with books, movies, TV shows, events or other projects to promote are more than happy to have the website repurpose their material, or to write for the site for free, because of its enormous reach.
But any time that you spend writing for free for exposure takes away from time you’re writing for pay. You need to weigh the value of that sort of promotional time and what the return on your investment would be.
Other bloggers — including me — affiliate themselves with blog advertising networks that occasionally ask to run whole posts or snippets of posts on their front page, with or without paying anything for them. Even in these instances, it’s a good idea to weigh the value of agreeing to allow another site to re-publish something without compensation.
WordCount is part of the BlogHer ad network. The network frequently links back to my posts, but has never attempted to run an entire post without permission. BlogHer frequently runs blog series where they offer members of their ad network a fee to write an original post that would appear on both their site and the blogger’s site. I’ve participated in some of those campaigns because I was being paid for the post, and because it helped introduce my blog to people who could potentiall become regular readers.
What about you: have you allowed a website or blog to re-publish your work, and if you did, what was your reason for agreeing? Share your story by leaving a comment.
Got a freelancing question? Send it to Dear WordCount at wordcountfreelance@gmail.com.
[Flickr photo by rasputin243]
Helen Wills says
I had always been under the impression that Google will see duplicated content as a red flag and down-rank it, hence I never allow fully copied posts, only short excerpts, with a link back to the full text on my site. Does anyone know how accurate this fact is?
Michelle V. Rafter says
Helen:
I’ve heard the same thing. It’s another reason why you shouldn’t agree to let another website re-run your entire post.
Here’s some background reading on the subject:
In Attention Bloggers: Should You Be Worried About Duplicate Content, SEO expert Kathryn Rose says if you agree to let a larger website re-run your posts, that site “could rank in the search engines rather than your own, original version.” You can get around that by using a “Rel = canonical” tag, which Rose explains how to do in her post.
Some bloggers run multiple posts on their front page, as a way to show more of their content to visitors — that’s the thought behind this site’s recent redesign. But do you run into the duplicate copy issue if you’re running your latest post on the front page and again somewhere else? Here’s a 2011 post from WebProNews quoting a Google employee about what to do to avoid that particular situation: Google on Duplicate Content Concerns Regarding Blog Posts on the Home Page.
Michelle
Marko Saric says
I wouldn’t really let anyone republish my article in the entirety. Instead I would pick and choose from the requests and push towards them publishing a shorter version of the article with the link and call to action for people to come to me for the full story. Links from other sites are important in driving traffic and search engine rankings so those are the main reasons for considering this.
Ellen Girardeau Kempler says
You’re lucky that at least someone asked before taking (or stealing) content from your site. As a first-time website publisher I started noticing an abnormal number of hits on one of my posts about California’s Glass Beach. Then, when I went to update the post and add more images and video, I discovered that a much larger travel site run by one of my LinkedIn contacts had republished part of my blog post verbatim (text and photo) with only a very small font link back to my site and no mention of the site or author’s name. I contacted the site owner immediately and told him I needed him to add my name and the name of my website. Also, he would need my permission in the future. I added copyright plugins and watermarks for all my photos and completely rewrote the blog post to avoid duplication. I also added the stolen clip as a guest blogging credit on my resume. I’ve been interested to follow the progress of that story through the various destination-oriented websites because it’s a story I resurrected with a little research. Wish it had paid off better for me than those other sites!
Michelle V. Rafter says
Ellen:
The few times that similar things have happened to me – bloggers copying entire posts onto their own blogs with or without credit – I’ve asked them to remove the post. If they don’t ask for permission or pay me to reprint a post, I won’t allow them to re-run it. And I allow dupulicate copies of my posts to run anywhere. If someone wants me to write something for their site, they can call me and negotiate a fee or a guest post gig. I don’t list blog posts or guest posts among my clips, but that’s smart that you did.
Michelle