The Law Blog

I want to make my own blog site, and im getting pictures from multiple sites and blog sites as well, does this violate any law that i should be aware of? thanks!

It will probably violate copyright law. Generally speaking, under copyright law, such photos are owned by either the photographer or the publisher as a work for hire product (i.e. the photographer was paid to take the photograph by the publisher with the understanding that the publisher gets the ownership rights).

In the United States, federal copyright law can incur some hefty statutory penalties for copyright infringement and the copyright holder does not have to warn you or tell you to take down the infringing content first.

There are a couple exceptions to copyright infringement. One is that copyrights expire after a period of time and become "public domain" meaning anyone can use them. The period of time varies depending on when the item was first published but generally speaking we are talking about fairly long periods of time (usually 95 years or the lifetime of the author plus 70 years in the United States) so it is not likely to apply to most if not all of the photos you might be interested in using for your website.

Another exception is use under the fair use doctrine. In its most general sense, fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Depending on the relationship between the photo and your accompanying commentary on your blog you might have a valid fair use defense but you should be aware that fair use, unless it is so obvious that the copyright owner deems it not worth pursuing an infringement claim, often ends up being determined among lawyers in a court room which ends up costing you lots of money.

If you want to use the photos the best course of action is to contact the owner of the website and ask if they own the copyright or licensing rights and ask for their permission to publish it on your blog site.

Also look for watermarks on the photographs that indicate the copyright owner. If a photo bears a copyright watermark you absolutely must get the permission as it is often indicative that the copyright is owned by a stock photo company and such copyright holders often tend to vigorously enforce their copyrights and regularly scout the internet for copyright infringement.

It really isn’t as hard to make money on MySpace as you may think it is. In fact, the only real problem with marketing on Myspace is getting views from people and then getting them interested in whatever your selling. However, this can easily be fixed by simply adding a lot of friends to your MySpace friend account. Unfortunately this usually takes a long time, especially if your doing it by hand right? Wrong!

In fact, there are actual programs out there that you can download which can effortlessly allow you to automatically add as many friends as you want. Some of these programs will even let you divvy the users up so you can pick and choose who you want to add. For example, say I want to reach just men, ages 35-55, who live in the state of Florida; well these programs will let you do exactly that, and a whole lot more once you configure the program a bit more to what you want and how you want it.

You really can be as picky as you want and still get a ton of users. I mean Myspace alone has more than 250 million users. You can choose from location, sex, age, interests, why they are on Myspace, keywords, etc. Obviously all of this can come together quite nicely if you think before you do. Come up with a plan. For example, if you are an affiliate with a Wine or Liquor program such as http://www.Wine.com it’s a good idea to go and find the states that actually allow the shipment of alcohol. In Pennsylvania its against the law for us to order ANY type of alcohol online and have it sent to our home.

Research this stuff! The last thing you want to do is send out 10,000 friend requests to people who won’t have an interest in your niche or can’t have it shipped to them. Don’t waste time making dumb mistakes!

When dealing with these programs you can automatically add friends obviously, but you can also send them comments, PMs, and bulletins; automatically. Yep you heard me! Say you have 50,000 friends, and you want to promote something like your website, service or product, simply pick which friends you want to send the comment to, and voila, you just sent 50,000 comments to 50,000 people in a matter of minutes. Easy as pie. And it will pay off in the end!

Be sure to try and make comments and bulletins as professional looking as humanly possible. You want these people to think you’re a real professional not just a Joe Shmo trying to sell them something. Usually for the most part people don’t like being “sold”, so remember this when speaking to people!

And lastly, make sure your profile is also as professional as can be. Try to have a nice clean looking layout, nothing too complicated, but nothing to bland either. Include links on your profile to whatever you are selling or to websites you want to promote, tell people a little bit about yourself but keep it “clean”. I always find when I see a site on MySpace that looks professional and I go and read the “about me” if it’s too “odd” or it sounds like the person got a little too personal about themselves, I will usually click off the page. So just be careful about the content and fluidity of your profile/blog/photos. Good luck!

Kristi Ambrose
http://www.articlesbase.com/art-and-entertainment-articles/myspace-friend-adder-marketing-696749.html

The picture was issued under creative common license (BY – NC – SA), but since I only put it on my personal blog which is public to some of my friends then I didn’t violence any copyright law, right ?
Thanks for replying. I also want to know whether the law of copyright is different based on country ? For example: in my case, I will violence the law if I was in US, but if I was Vietnam I won’t violence the law ?

Or the copyright law is issued worldwide and applied to any country ?

You can use any pics on your blog. What you do, is acknowledge the original owner in small small print just to protect yourself. This way, it won’t kill your blog.
Copyright laws are for those who make a living or money on other peoples’ work.