Top 5 Ways to Prevent Copyright Theft of Your Wordpress Blog

If you are launching a new site, especially a new blog, there are several things that you can do to make sure that your copyright is as protected as possible.

Simply put, when you are starting from scratch, you have a rare opportunity to get things right from the start and many of the best tools to protect your work function at their best when you use them from day one.

So, if you’re preparing to launch a new site, whether it is a static one or a blog, here are the steps you need to take today to protect your work or, if you’re not interested in enforcement, track it and encourage its sharing.

1. Register with the U.S.Copyright Office

Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is both slow and expensive. It’s also hopelessly out of date with the current Web and can take some nine months get your certificate.

Still, the fact remains that, if you want execute your full rights in the U.S., you need that registration. You need it both to file suit in a Federal Court and you need to have either registered before the infringement or within three months of publication to be able to collect statutory damages.

If you think you might ever want to sue for copyright infringement, you will want to register your work promptly. It’s a pain and it costs $35 but it can be invaluable down the road.

Likewise, as you add content to your site, you will likely want to re-register every 3 months to ensure that the registration is up to date and all content is protected.

2. Register with FairShare or Use Google Alerts

If you have a site where most of the content will be in an RSS feed, set up an account with FairShare so it can begin tracking the content in your feed from the first post. The service is free and only requires you to subscribe to the provided RSS feed where it will list where matches of your work were discovered along with some basic information.

If your content is largely static, you can use Google Alerts. I’ve covered Google Alerts before, but basically you just find good, unique phrases within your content and have Google search for those phrases and email you with any results it finds.

3. Set up an RSS Footer

If your site will put a large part of its content into an RSS feed, add a footer to the feed. You can use a simple WordPress plugin to do that if you’re a self-hosted WordPress user or, Blogger users can simply use the option in their admin panel.

Ideally, it should include a copyright statement, a link back to your site and, possibly, a digital fingerprint to make the tracking of your content even easier.

Since RSS scraping is one of the biggest problems content creators face, this can make sure that such use is at least attributed and trackable, even if it won’t put a stop to it.

4. Set Up Your Site’s Footer

Though you don’t technically need to include any copyright information for your work to be protected, it is a very good idea to do so as many have the misconception that, if it is not marked, it is free to use.

Make sure your footer includes all the basic copyright information including the year, which you can configure to update automatically, the copyright symbol, your name and the license information for the work (All Rights Reserved, Creative Commons, etc.)

5. Add Contact Information for Permissions

Finally, as you’re setting up how people will contact you, make sure to have a means for people to contact you to ask permission to use your work.

This is a good idea even if you use some form of blanket licensing, such as Creative Commons, as people will still contact you about these issues. This happens both because they don’t understand or see the license and because they want to use the work in a way that goes beyond it.

If you offer a clear path to contact you about these issues, even if it is just through your regular contact page, you’ll find people to be much more likely to ask permission than they would otherwise.

Bottom Line

When starting a new site, whether your first or your hundredth, it is a chance to get things right and avoid mistakes that you made with the other efforts. Copyright is no different in that regard.

If you value your content, its worth taking some time before launching to make some adjustments and make sure that your work is protected. Doing so will not only help you enforce your copyright, but also track where it appears on the Web, legitimately and unlawfully, letting you better understand your audience and reach.

So take the opportunity and spend a few minutes making sure your work is adequately protected.

[thanks to paul keller and jonathan bailey via cc]

Top 5 Ways to Deal With Police Officers Safely & Effectively

I have had more opportunities to deal with police officers than most people, both as a collaborator on certain justice initiatives, as an adversary defending clients, and as a motorist with a penchant for fast cars. I also have several friends “on the job” (I’ve been watching Law & Order) with whom I’ve had many interesting conversations about policing, justice, and civil rights. They might call me a sleazebag who works to keep criminals on the street, and I might call them unwitting tools of an oppressive state, but at the end of the day we have a mutual respect and understand the role that each other has to play in our system.

As of today, there’s one more police officer in my Blackberry contacts list – a long time friend of mine graduated from RCMP training yesterday and is now packing heat and flashing tin (that’s more great TV cop show lingo). I’m sure he’s going to make an excellent officer and serve the community well, and I offer him my sincerest congratulations.

In honor of this occasion, I offer my readers my top five tips for dealing with police officers. Whether at a routine traffic stop, as a witness to a crime, or even as a suspect, there’s a good chance that at some point you’ll have to interact with law enforcement – here’s how to make sure that interaction is safe and uneventful for everyone involved.

1. Be polite. The overwhelming majority of police officers are good, honest people just doing their job. Be polite and respectful, and know that yes sir, no sir, please and thank you will go a long way. Don’t talk back, don’t get confrontational, and don’t be rude. If an officer is considering giving you a ticket (or worse), arguing and yelling isn’t going to change his mind. Police spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with scumbags who treat them with utter disdain- don’t be one of those people.
2. Don’t give him reason to be nervous. Every police officer has a gun and knows how to use it. Every police officer has also been trained to react quickly and decisively to threatening situations, and to be constantly on the lookout for potential threats. I once got called home after the alarm went off at my house, and the alarm company had automatically called the police as well. The officer must have showed up just after I did, because as I was going towards my patio door to check it from the inside, he was approaching from the outside. I’m not sure who frightened who more; I jumped and shrieked like a girl, he reached for his weapon. A few seconds later we laughed about it as I excused myself to change my underwear. The moral? Don’t be jumpy, don’t make unexpected movements, and keep your hands in plain view. A relaxed and comfortable police officer is much less likely to taser your twitchy ass.
3. Don’t think you’re smarter than the police officer. You might be smarter, you might not, but keep in mind that it is the officer’s job to pick up on lies and I can assure you that an officer can sniff out bullshit better than you can lie. Don’t try to be cute or a smartass- it’s not going to get you anywhere, or at least not anywhere that you actually want to go.
4. Know when to shut up. So if you can’t outsmart a cop, what can you do? Shut up, that’s what. No matter what a police officer tells you, no matter what promises are made or how much pressure gets puts on you, no matter how innocent you are, you are under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to talk to an officer, to make any sort of statement, or to answer any question. Police are very skilled at extracting the information they want, and even an innocuous line of questioning could be much more serious than you realize. If you think you might be in trouble, shut your mouth, call your lawyer, and don’t say a single word until he or she arrives. Don’t even accept an offer of a coffee while you wait – police coffee is the absolute worst. And possibly poisoned.
5. Know your rights. While it’s important to be reasonably polite when dealing with the police, it’s equally important to know your rights. That includes the right to keep quiet, the right to refuse a request to search your belongings, your car or your house, and the right to walk away if you’re not being detained. When I offer this type of advice, I often get the folksy response “If you didn’t do anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” That’s just not true- you’ve got plenty to worry about, as miscarriages of justice do happen. You’ve also got the right to take a principled stand against unwarranted state intrusions on the lives of its citizens. Understand your rights and be willing to exercise them.

Keep your noses clean, folks!

[thanks to kashklick and money grubbing lawyer via cc]

Dave Matthews Band Gives Instructions on Beating Music DRM

The CD version of Stand Up, the release from the Dave Matthews Band, contains copy control technology that is ostensibly designed to limit or prevent copying. The technology doesn’t do a particularly good job at stopping copying, however, though it is very good at annoying consumers. Artists don’t appear to be fans either. The Dave Matthews Band has posted instructions on their website for how to work around the technology to copy the songs on the CD for playback on an iPod.

INFORMATION REGARDING DOWNLOADING STAND UP SONGS TO IPODS
Please follow the instructions below in order to move your content into iTunes and onto an iPod:

If you have a Mac computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player as you would normally do.

If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and allow the CD to automatically start. If the CD does not automatically start, open your Windows Explorer, locate the drive letter for your CD drive and double-click on the LaunchCD.exe file located on your CD.

Once the CD has been burned, place the copied CD back into your computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would a normal CD.

Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above.

For Macintosh users such as myself, there is nothing additional to do, since the copy-control technology does not work on a Mac. For Windows users, there is no need to hack the program since making several permitted copies using different programs eventually leads to the songs ending up on your iPod. I’m not sure about Linux users, though I am guessing that the copy control doesn’t work on their systems either.

The Dave Matthews Band posting and its label’s use of copy-control technology raises several issues. The web instructions also highlight the continuing divide between the labels and artists (see the iTunes related reaction of Japanese artists to Sony Records for another example).

I’d like to focus on two other issues here though. First, the private copying implications. The Dave Matthews Band may support their fans copying their music onto iPods, but Canadian law still does not. Canadians that follow the band’s instructions appear to infringe Canadian law. Moreover, it is worth noting the recent remarks of RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol. In a speech to NARM, Bainwol commented that the RIAA has “no objection to personal use burning”. This raises the question of why Canadians are stuck paying millions for the private copying levy, when the levy doesn’t cover the copying they typically engage in, the artists have only received a fraction of the money collected, and the industry itself does not object to the copying (and in the U.S. at least does not expect any additional compensation for such copying).

Moreover, consider these instructions within the context of Bill C-60 and its anti-circumvention provision. The provision applies to a “technological measure,” which is defined as “any technology, device or component that, in the ordinary course of its operation, restricts the doing . . .of any act” that would constitute an infringement of several different Copyright Act provisions. Section 34.02 of Bill C-60 provides copyright owners with a basket of rights against anyone who “circumvents, removes, or renders ineffective a technological measure” for the purpose of copyright infringement.

This brings us to the question of these provisions and copy control technology. First, leaving aside the private copying issue, consumers that follow the Dave Matthews Band instructions would not appear to run afoul of this particular provision since they are not circumventing anything. Mac users are proceeding as usual, while Windows users are using the functionality built into the copy control mechanism to make their desired copies.

Second (and more interestingly), does the copy control technology even qualify as a technological measure under Bill C-60? If it does, should it? I don’t think we have a clear answer here. Other jurisdictions focus on the effectiveness of the technological measure. Given the Dave Matthews Band instructions, it is hard to see how these measures are effective. In Canada, however, the bill speaks of “ordinary use.” The copy-control may be advertised as being ordinarily used to control copying, even if it does nothing of the sort. It should not be enough to simply characterize a technology as a technological measure and immediately enjoy legal protections. The failure to include an effectiveness standard in Bill C-60 is yet one more reason why Canadians should stand up to the proposed copyright reform package.

[thanks to shazari and michael geist via cc]

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