A reader asked:
I have a blogging friend who’s pretty paranoid about anyone passing on her work without quoting where they got it from, telling when it was posted and contacting her for permission to pass it on.
What are your feelings on the ethics/etiquette of passing along a great post without jumping through the hoops of getting permission? I imagine it would be hard for a post to go viral if everyone was getting permission to send it on down the line.
Thanks for all your great contributions to the blogging world.
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You don’t legally need permission to pass on a public post any more than you need permission to hand a magazine to someone else to read. Proper etiquette does call for you to at least give an original link , and if the author isn’t named, it’s good manners to include their name.
It’s also an acceptable practice to put an excerpt from a post /article you like on your own blog, maybe make a comment or recommendation, then link to the original.
Writers almost universally appreciate it when you share their work. Getting more readers is the whole point for 99.9% of bloggers.
If your friend is that particular about her own work being shared, then she shouldn’t be too surprised that her audience won’t grow very fast (unless she just has truly remarkable content). If she has strict rules about her own content being shared, she should post those rules prominently and clearly at the end of each of her posts.
Regardless, no one is breaking a law if they share her public blog content as long as they credit it to her.
Seems kind of strange to put content out there on a blog for the general public then be “paranoid” if people pass it on with a link and/or the authors name. The only element that really matters with respect to page ranking, search engines, back links and growing traffic is that the correct link is prominently and accurately included.
Maybe she is worried about DUPLICATE content, and someone else getting the “juice” for her content. She shouldn’t worry. The search engines give value to the original indexing of content, not the duplicates.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
This information is incorrect, linking is fine, but copying and pasting the entire article is not. It’s not the same as ‘passing a magazine to someone else’ it’s as if you were photocopying and distributing the magazine to your entire town! Bloggers make their money from page views primarily, so if the content is being shared without people having to visit the actual blog, it is doing harm to the blogger.
Gone are the days where most people blog only for the sharing of information, most bloggers now also have to make an income to justify the enormous amount of time it takes to run a blog.
Linking, and a small excerpt (quote) of the article is great and usually encouraged, but full on copying and pasting a substantial portion of the article/post or copying the entire thing is illegal and unethical. If someone doesn’t mind if people copy and paste the article in full, they will note this.
I was told that you can’t copy and paste even a blog entry (doesn’t matter if you give a link back to the source) without violating copyright infringement. The person who told me this gave me this link- http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html and said that you could only summarize a blog entry and then give a link to the original. I am very confused! The person made mention to bloggers making money by how many people visit their blog (of course money would be the reason).
Can you please clarify if they’ve changed anything?
Hello Brent,
For those of us beginning bloggers, this was a big help! Thank You.
what about news paper or magazine content? can someone post there info on there blog without getting in trouble from the magazines?
I know it’s more original to perhaps include an excerpt of someone else’s blog, and then add value by commenting on it, but I’d like to understand the etiquette if I would like to simply use someone else’s entire post. In this scenario I am not passing it off as my own, but simply serving as a sort of syndicator.
In this case I’m thinking in the way the eZine articles are used, where the guidelines are that the post is used 100% as-is and at the bottom attribution is given to the writer.
For blog posts, I’ve seen people simply copy the other person’s post, then at the bottom say simply something like “via – [name of post included]” with the right link. Is this enough, or is more appropriate to do more in terms of a citation?
Proper etiquette is to credit the source no matter whether an excerpt or a full piece. Typically a full article will come with an author written attribution they want included. For excerpts, a link to the full article is acceptable.
I have been wanting to know the answer to this!!! I did not want to offend someone due to lack of knowledge.
Thanks
Brent, thanks for this post. a question similar to this one. I read several blogs of adoptive moms who are still waiting to bring their children home from Guat. I have thought about doing a post asking my readers pray for these families, and identifying those blogs and linking them in my post. That way, people might also check out those blogs and give those families support too. I do not know these waiting families, other than my reading of their blogs and commenting in their comments. Do you thingk I need to get their permissions to identify their blogs and link to them in my post? They are all public — not password protected.
If their blogs are completely public, I would say no. In those cases, if they have a problem with it, they can let you know, and you can say “sorry” and immediately remove the link. But when things are put up to the open public, linking to them is almost always welcome, and there is NOTHING legally wrong with it, period (even if they tell you “no”, you can still link legally, it’s just not good manners).