Creative copyright for your blog

Y'all know that I do not mind sharing things with people. If I did then I wouldn't keep blogs. That's what you do on blogs is share things right? 

I don't even mind when you tell other people things that I've written in my blogs. As long as it's not in a gossipy that-stupid-girl-said-such-and-such kind of way. And as long as you don't take credit for it yourself and act like it's something you wrote. That makes me angry.

So imagine how irate I got when I was skimming through some recipes yesterday and came across one that looked familiar. Very familiar. As in mine. All the way down to my little :) that I sometimes add to things. My exact words copied and posted and told to be someone else's words. I was extremely hot. In a very bad way.

I emailed the person and told them that they stole my work. They said they had no idea that they should give me credit and apologized and my anger subsided. They've since linked my recipe back to me. Cool.

That got me thinking about copyrighting. I do have a copyright statement on the bottom of all my blogs but it's small. Here's what it looks like on this blog:



I decided that apparently that wasn't good enough so I went to the site Creative Commons and set up specific copyright pages for all my blogs. This is what that copyright looks like:



Like I said, I made one for each of my specific blogs and those links can be found at the top of each of my sidebars. To copy and use ANYTHING that I have on ANY of my blogs this is what you do:



1. Go to the post that you want to copy. Say you want to copy the last post I wrote here about the text site TextSpace. Click on the title of that post to get to that page.


2. Once you are there click on the copyright image at the top of the sidebar:




That will take you to a separate page that looks like this (the post you want to copy will still be open):



You can click on the picture to make it bigger.


3. Copy what you want to copy of my post and paste it into your post. 


4. Now go to the copyright page that opened in a new tab and copy the link that is in the square under "Attribution"





5. Go back to your post and paste that code under the section of post that you copied of mine.


Here's an example of what that will look like:

Do you want to be able to write quotes and have them be pretty? You can do that on this site. Here's a few examples:

Kathy Brakhage / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Notice how it says my name. If you click on that it will take you to the original post that you copied it from. If you click on the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 it will take you to the Creative Commons page that explains what you can and can not do with my work.

I would truly appreciate you using this if you use my work. I think it's only right. To me taking someone's work, be it photos, text or anything else they may post on their blogs, without their permission or knowledge is stealing. Don't do it! It's really simple to link to them. I've made it simpler (at least to me) to link to specific items. 

This works on whatever page or post you are on. The copyright script automatically links to that specific page or post so there's no need to edit anything. Just add it when you use something that someone else posted. Please. It's the right think to do.

If you'd like to add a Creative Commons copyright to your page this is what you do:


1. Go here


2. Choose "License" (it's on the right hand side)


3. Choose your options

• Allow commercial uses of your work? Yes means that people can use your work in a commercial way like for their advertising. No means they can only use your work for non-commercial ways. I always choose no but that's up to you.

• Allow modifications of your work? Yes means that people can change what you wrote. Yes, as long as others share alike means that they can change it as long as they keep the same copyright rules that you have on your work. No means that they have to post your work exactly like you posted it without changing anything. I always choose no to that too.

• Jurisdiction of your license Choose the country you reside in

Additional information

• Title of work The name of your blog

• Attribute work to name Your name

• Attribute work to URL Your blogs URL

• Source work URL If you used something from another place in your post put the URL to it in this space

4. Choose "Select a license"

5. Pick the icon that you want to you by clicking on the circle underneath it


6. Copy the HTML in the box below that

7. Go to your Blogger dashboard


8. Go to "Layout" and then "Page Elements" for the blog you just set up the copyright for

9. Add a gadget HTML/JavaScript and paste the code into it. Save.


10. Place it where you want it on your blog. Preview to make sure it looks right and then save.

Your page is now copyrighted. You may want to write a post informing people of the addition if you think they won't see it or know what it is for. That's up to you too :)

I'm going to link this post into my posts that I write on my other blogs today too so that everyone can read it....I hope they read it anyway. Maybe no more of my work will be stolen! I'm really hopin' that because I'd hate to be the mean person that goes crunk on people or gets them in trouble. Y'all know that's not me ♥