MyFreeCopyright: Protect Your Blog Content

I’ve been reading some blogging tips on the Playgroups are No Place for Children blog (very helpful!) and noticed a badge on the site for a service called myfreecopyright. I’ve been thinking about copyright issues relating to this blog a lot since I’ve already found a few sites through Google Alerts that have strange mashups of some of my post content. Anyway, I clicked on the badge to check it out, then hopped onto Google to search for some reviews (e.g., see this very positive review from Plagiarism Today). I decided to give it a try, and the entire process of obtaining an account took less than 5 minutes – very nice! For a blog, all that you need to complete the process is your RSS feed URL – enter that and each post will be sent to myfreecopyright for date registration. I just completed this process, and now all 67 of my posts to date are officially copyrighted – you can click on the badge at the top-left of this post or at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar to see for yourself. Furthermore, because it accesses my RSS feed, all future posts will be registered automatically.

In addition to copyrighting your post content, the service also allows you to assign a Creative Commons license to your copyright – for this blog, the CC license is now assigned as “Attribution Share Alike,” which according to Creativecommons.org means:

“This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.”

All in all, I am initially very impressed with this service.