You have a blog where you post your original content, but you’re afraid someone could steal it or use it in a way you don’t like – that’s why you need to know: How to copyright a blog! Then you should seriously consider adding a copyright notice to your blog!
Copyright is necessary to protect your original content.
But how to copyright a blog? How do you add a copyright notice? Can you add it to your blog’s footer?
In this post, we’ll show you how to effectively protect your work, step by step to show you: How to copyright a blog!
First, let’s answer a basic question:
Copyright is essentially the “right to copy”. It refers to the exclusive right – as author – to use your original work, once it has been fixed in tangible medium (for example, a photograph, a poem or a song).
Even though you’re automatically granted a copyright when you fix your work, the issue lies in proving that you were actually the author of that content. This is especially true when it comes to online content, because it can be more difficult to prove or enforce ownership.
That’s when a copyright notice can come in handy.
This article is a part of our series on compliance for bloggers and web publishers. Read also:
Copyright notices can, at the very least, make a difference by discouraging others from copying or stealing your content and may even enable you to take legal action if that were to happen – especially when supported by your Terms of Use or license notices (if applicable).
Therefore, it’s always a smart choice to add a copyright notice to your blog to help ensure your original content is safe from misuse.
Here are the 3 best ways to copyright your blog:
You can easily add a copyright notice to your blog’s footer. We’ll show you how to do it on WordPress, because it’s the most common CMS platform, but the idea is the same for other websites too: all you need to do is to add a text widget to the footer section, and then add your copyright notice.
From your WordPress dashboard, go under Appearance → Customize → Widgets and choose a text widget. Here you will enter your copyright notice.
The notice should at least include:
You can find an example of copyright notice wording here.
If your copyright notice is included in a Terms and Conditions document, or you want to redirect to a license, you simply need to add that link to the footer as well. Consider that a terms and conditions document often contains further copyright details and license information, so it’s often enough to simply link to your terms document.
The link can look something like this:
Terms and ConditionsYou don’t know how to add a link to the footer of your WordPress blog? Don’t worry! You can watch this video:
Again, the video shows you how to embed the document on WordPress, but you can do just the same on other platforms.
Our Terms and Conditions Generator makes it easy to create a professional terms and conditions with the lawyer-crafted copyright clauses that every blogger needs.
