You might have observed 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 discovered a new vanity in my mid-40s. The reason is that in my on-going battle versus websites that republish my material without approval it is much simpler for me to prove evidence of ownership and creativity when my face is in the cover image. If youre interested in the description of that, keep reading..

Whenever I publish something about copyright, I get a lot of follow-up questions. These are a few of the regularly asked questions..

You may have observed 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 factor is that in my on-going fight versus websites that republish my content without authorization it is much easier for me to show evidence of ownership and originality when my face is in the cover image. Filing DMCA takedown notifications is time-consuming and even when filed appropriately some hosting companies still need even more evidence of initial work and ownership. Being able to state, “hey, thats my photo of myself wearing my preferred flannel shirt” is a lot simpler and faster than writing a description of the creativity of my blog post.

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

I like to share the title or a little summary of your blog post 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 want someone to check out the entire blog site post, provide them the link to it..

The majority of the websites that are stealing my work these days are doing so through automated ways. Its reasonably easy to write a script that scrapes all of the material from an RSS feed and imports it into a various website. Truncating or stopping my RSS feed stops a few of the thieves, but a lot of have actually moved onto utilizing scripts that scrape directly 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. Additionally, I then file DMCA takedown notices with the sites hosting services..
Filing DMCA takedown notifications is time-consuming and even when submitted properly some hosting companies still require even more evidence of initial work and ownership. Being able to state, “hey, thats my image of myself using my favorite flannel shirt” is a lot easier and faster than writing an explanation of the originality of my blog site post.

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

Help Understanding Copyright, Creative Commons, and Fair Use.

Can I forward your newsletter to my colleagues?
Yes, naturally. Strike the forward button in your inbox and share it as I wrote it (over-use of parentheses and hyphens is among the hallmarks of my article so dont be tempted to modify those out)..