Don’t Copyright Your Blog by Jennifer Guyer, Writer in Residence

What?
Did I hear you right?
What about people who might steal my ideas?
Or flat out copy my posts and use them as their own?

I know how you feel. I asked those exact same questions when I first started blogging.
In retrospect, I’m glad that I didn’t worry about it but just wrote and trusted everything would work
out in the end.

Here are some helpful things I’ve learned along my blogging journey:

1. There isn’t a cost efficient way to copyright an entire blog.

I learned this the hard way. The more comfortable I became writing blog posts and sharing them with
the world, the more I started talking about my unfinished novels. It wasn’t until I participated in a
blogging linkup and shared the magic system I came up with for my books that I thought, “Maybe I
should be concerned about protecting my content.” 

I started looking into how to copyright my blog. The copyright website was so confusing.
There were more legal terms and jargon than normal words. But I figured out that I needed to submit
it under one of their categories. But what category does a blog fit into? I took a leap of faith and decided
to submit it as a “Literary Work.” I did my best to fill out the paperwork and submit an acceptable format
of my blog for review.

11 weeks later, I got an email from someone at the copyright office telling me I submitted my work
in the wrong format and that I had 45 days to resubmit it in the proper format before they close the case.
What?! I thought I had already complied with their requirements. I asked my friends for help. I eventually
found out what I needed to do and resubmitted my blog for copyright review.

A month later I got another email. No, my blog was not copyrighted yet. In fact, “At this time the
Copyright Office does not have a regulatory exception that would allow us to register a group
of published online works, such as blogs or website updates.” All that work and now they tell me
it can’t be done unless I register every single one of my blog posts separately. That means I’d have to fork
out $55.00 for every post I want copyrighted.  Since I already paid $55 when I initially submitted my
blog, I am able to have one of my posts registered. Guess which one I picked? Yeah, the one with my
magic system laid out.

But the cost of copyrighting a blog is not the only mark against copyrighting.

2. Blogging is about Community

Why are you blogging in the first place? I mean what’s the purpose? You and I may have different reasons
for blogging but we essentially have the same purpose. We want to talk with other people about the things
that interest us. That’s what any social media really is: a way to connect with people who share a common
interest. You may be trying to help people who are going through the same thing you’ve been through -
like adopting kids or learning not to copyright a blog. Or you might want to make money. But in order to
make that money, you’re going to have to have an idea of what people want to know. You would need to
know our audience and have something worth selling.

How do you find your audience? You interact with other bloggers who are doing the same thing you are
doing. Do blog tours, guest posts, interviews. Make comments and figure out what other bloggers are
doing right. But this post isn’t about how to market your blog. It’s about why you don’t need to copyright
your blog. And the purpose of your blog isn’t to protect your ideas from others, it’s to share your ideas
with others, to make friends you can talk to about the things you care about.

3. Ideas are Cheap

I learned this from Brandon Sanderson. He talks about how a lot of writers will say that it’s the Novel
Idea of a story that makes a good book. But that’s not the case. A poor writer can have the best idea and
still write a bad book. And a good writer can have the worst idea and write an excellent book. When it
comes to blogs, if someone flat out steals your post as their own, I would just look at it as a form a flattery. They liked what you had to say and you should keep writing. Would it be worth it to take them to court?
Probably not, even though everything you write is yours legally, and you would probably win. At what
cost? Copyrighting would make it easier to prove it’s yours but you could win without officially
copyrighting your blog. Think of it more like registering your blog posts rather than “copyrighting blog
posts.” 

And if they take an idea you shared on your blog and turn it into a book or something, well, that is
perfectly legal for them to do. We get ideas from anything and everything. There is nothing new under
the sun. There are only different ways to talk about the same things. Think of it as inspiring another author
to create a story of their own. What a wonderful gift to give someone!