I have been blogging online for several years now…even before we started the Two Classy Chics blog and let me tell you, my Intellectual Property Rights have been violated several times.
What do the words “intellectual property” mean? It means that certain things on your blog and/or web site are considered to be YOUR PROPERTY and people can not come along and snag those things for themselves. This includes the words in your posts, your personal images, graphics, etc.
Many of us in the online blogging business refer to this as ‘content stealing’ but it can also refer to many other different things. It can mean that someone is stealing your registered trademark, your personal music that you made, personal photographs, YouTube videos that you made and other artistic work.
Just because you publish something online…doesn’t give others the right to take it! What can you do about it? Well, I am going to tell you!
Once you have discovered that your Intellectual Property Rights have been violated, you need to first send that violator a cease and desist letter. This letter can be sent via email or via postal mail to the violator. In that notification, you need to demand that they remove the stolen property from their web site, blog, e-book, etc. and give them a specific time-frame to get it corrected. (personally, I give them ONLY 48 hours to correct the situation).
If the cease and desist letter does not rattle their cages, you can contact all of the advertisers on their website/blog. In addition, contact their web host and IP provider to report them for content stealing. All hosting companies and IP providers take this thing pretty seriously, and they are pretty quick at shutting down the violator.
If all of that fails to get you the results that you need, you can contact an Intellectual Property Attorney who can help you legally to get the situation rectified. Once you get an attorney involved, these situations are usually cleared up pretty quickly.
The most important thing is this…do NOT ignore the problem! You should never let ‘content stealers’ get away with stealing your property online! You would never allow someone to come into your home and take things that didn’t belong to them, so don’t allow it to happen online.
Protect yourself, your blog and your rights!
I don’t understand why some people think it is allright to steal posts,photos, etc. from other blogs. I am glad that there are ways to protect your rights
I’ve heard of this before – other people stealing posts from blogs and never giving credit or asking. I just don’t understand what people are thinking!