You might have seen that my face is appearing in more of the cover images for my blog site posts and in more of the cover images for my videos. The reason is that in my on-going battle against sites that republish my material without consent it is much easier for me to prove evidence of ownership and creativity when my face is in the cover image. Filing DMCA takedown notices is lengthy and even when filed appropriately some hosting business still require even more proof of initial work and ownership. Being able to say, “hey, thats my image of myself wearing my favorite flannel shirt” is a lot simpler and faster than writing an explanation of the creativity of my blog site post.

I embedded your YouTube video into my class/ school site, is that all right?.
Yes, thats totally fine as long as youre using the embed or link provided by YouTube and not downloading the video then republishing it (check out YouTubes TOS for more details)..

I like to share the title or a little summary of your article with my staff, is that all right?
Yes, as long as youre not republishing the entire thing and or passing it off as your own. If you desire somebody to read the entire article, provide the link to it..

You may have seen that my face is appearing in more of the cover images for my article and in more of the cover images for my videos. There is a factor for that and its not that Ive found a brand-new vanity in my mid-40s. The reason is that in my on-going fight against sites that republish my content without consent it is much easier for me to show evidence of ownership and originality when my face is in the cover image. If youre interested in the description of that, keep reading..

Assist Understanding Copyright, Creative Commons, and Fair Use.

If Youre in a Similar Situation, resources.
If you have a site or blog site that is also often scraped, here are some resources that might be valuable to you..

I get a bunch of follow-up questions Whenever I release something about copyright. These are a few of the often asked concerns..

Can I forward your newsletter to my coworkers?
Yes, of course. Hit the forward button in your inbox and share it as I composed it (over-use of hyphens and parentheses is among the hallmarks of my article so do not be tempted to modify those out)..

The majority of the websites that are stealing my work nowadays are doing so via automated ways. Its relatively easy to compose a script that scrapes all of the content from an RSS feed and imports it into a different website. Truncating or stopping my RSS feed stops a few of the thieves, however the majority of have actually moved onto using scripts that scrape straight from the website instead of from the RSS feed. Thats a little harder to stop so my recourse is to file DMCA takedown notices with Google to get them to get rid of the upseting material from their results pages. Furthermore, I then submit DMCA takedown notifications with the websites hosting services..
Filing DMCA takedown notices is lengthy and even when filed correctly some hosting companies still require even more evidence of original work and ownership. Being able to state, “hey, thats my picture of myself using my favorite flannel t-shirt” is a lot easier and faster than writing a description of the creativity of my blog site post.