W3hobbyist

Every 2^nd blog I visit is engaging in something illegal. They fancy themselves as ‘Big bloggers’ and expect to achieve it by copying articles from other websites or blogs. They feel it is ‘ok’ to copy-paste articles from other websites and include a ’source’ link at the bottom of the article. Sure that you can somewhat fool your visitors by pretending to be ‘ethical’ by adding that ’source’ link but on a serious note, you could be heading for some trouble. You may risk your online(and probably offline) identity. Your hosting account may be suspended.

‘Copyright’, demoted by a ‘©’ symbol, means that the rights to republish the work are reserved with the copyright holder, who may either be an individual or a company or an organization or a group. Without their permission, it is entirely illegal for you to copy their work. Including a ’source’ link and attribution to the author does not give you any rights to republish the work.

Apart from it being illegal, you run the risk having your blog under bad light. Visitors will often look down at you and your blog thinking that you have no ‘originality’. This inturn can affect your blog popularity and revenues.

Some elementary knowledge about copyrights and intellectual property rights(IPR) can be found here. Bear in mind that if your server is hosted in a country different than where you reside, you are needed to follow the ‘other’ countries copyright laws, because the data is on ‘their’ land.

Some uses of copyrighted work can be exempted from the copyright laws. Such use is known as ‘fair use‘. Examples of fair use are reviews, criticism, new reporting, etc. (But copy-pasting reviews is not a fair use!)

Copyright applies not only to the text on a website, but also the images, design and aesthetics, podcasts, etc. If you ever need to use copyrighted work(that do not qualify as ‘fair use’), you need to avail the copyright holder’ s permission to do so. The author may or may not permit free-of-charge. If you cannot afford the fee, for some resources at least, you can 85+ Free Killer Resources Every Designer Should Know.

No author/blogger would ever like to find some website copy-pasting his articles. If you are victim of such piracy, you can file a DMCA complaint with the web host hosting that website. The procedure to file a valid DMCA complaint has been beautifully explained by Lorelle: What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content

Note: Quoting small parts of articles does not amount to copyright violation, but it also depends upon what and how much is being quoted.