When I first started , I spent time thinking about , name recognition, copyright, etc. And when everyone jumped on the MySpace and Facebook thing (and by everyone I mean other indy businesses who started a MySpace for their company), I stepped back and spent time pondering copyright. I went to the site to read their TOS agreement and at the time, I found it quite scary. I wish I had the original text, but it basically stated that they had the right to use the images and content posted on their site in any way they saw fit.
What’s yours is mine…
Several of these sites have since changed their tune and now make it clear that the images and text posted to their site are not reproduced and distributed elsewhere online on their behalf (I.E. You won’t find from a MySpace page). As well, the ability to claim copyright infringement (and have a picture/text removed from their site) is more clear than in the past. Nonetheless, once it’s up there, though, you have no control what other members will do. (Of course the same holds true for blogs, websites, forums, etc).
…And what’s mine is everyone’s (apparently)
It’s a leap of faith when I post anything online, whether it be an image or text because it’s bound to be found somewhere else online. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found people copying and pasting text from my website into a forum or personal blog, and in one case, the person copied my website code. So, if you were a forum member clicking on the thread, you’d see a “piece” of my website right there with clickable links and all. And I was paying for that. Yeah. Because they were using my bandwidth to do it. Every time that page loaded up, every time it was viewed, I was paying for it. And if my bandwidth had exceeded that month, it would have cost me an additional $40 for that month alone. I’m not sure how they did it (or why), but getting it down was a pain (The forum was in Portuguese and I had to register and figure out who to contact and translate all communications).
I had a very popular crafty website take a picture of mine and write an article about crocheting. Yes they gave me credit for the image in the form of a link below the image, but how about asking permission first?
Or the time some blogger downloaded and re-posted my videos on their blog. Luckily they posted a link to my site and I found out about it (Their blog was gone in three days time). Videonapped?
Or the countless times I’ve had to contact some video sharing site to have my videos removed from their servers.
Or that person who used images from my website to start their own crochet pattern biz.
I could go on and on (in ).
