Copyright Archives | Sara F. Hawkins Attorney at Law
Articles on the topic of US Copyright Laws
Is a DMCA takedown notice always the way to go? One of the most common questions I'm asked has to do with what to do when someone takes content, whether written, images, audio or video. Copyright infringement in the online, digital, and mobile spaces is getting easier and more prolific by the day. As [...]
Pinterest Copyright and How To Avoid Problems You either know what Pinterest is or you don't. For those who do, just skip this next section. For the uninitiated, let's bring you up to speed. Pinterest in the online equivalent of all those torn out magazine photos, articles and recipes you've got taped on [...]
Copyright fair use is a very misunderstood part of the law. Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's fair to use. You’ve heard the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when that picture is protected by copyright, the picture is only worth three words: cease and desist. OK, [...]
Most SEO experts suggest using at least one photo in every blog post. From an aesthetic perspective, it's a good idea, especially when the online photo has something to do with the content. Photos and images are especially important for storytelling. Remember that "A picture is worth a thousand words" adage? I always thought [...]
Used to be that we would upload our photos to our computers and then email them out to friends and family. Then the photo files got to be larger and larger and it become annoying to send one photo at a time. Photo sharing sites were developed to help facilitate showing our friends and family [...]
Today I came across a series of tweets about a food blogger who was upset that another blogger took her photo and recipe, reproduced it on her site while providing a credit and link back in smaller text but also tagged the original blogger on Facebook. Earlier in the week, Confessions of a Cookbook Queen [...]
If I were to ask a room of online entrepreneurs if anyone has had their work copied without permission, I'm confident every hand in the room would go up. When I was in law school learning about copyright and intellectual property, I had a very heavy laptop computer. Copying music meant making a mixed [...]
Recipe Copyright Explained in Plain English One of the most asked questions I get has to do with recipe copyright. It's very upsetting for food bloggers to see their work copied verbatim. Unfortunately, unlike photos or images, all words don't carry the same weight when it comes to copyright. Recipes are one of those [...]
If Imitation is the highest form of flattery, please don't flatter me!. When I first started writing on to this information superhighway in about 1993, back when it was indeed called the World Wide Web, there was so little content no one really worried about what other people did. In the 17 years I’ve [...]