Do you have copyright info on your site?

[littlelum]

Most sites have a "content copyright this person or organization" type of thing at the bottom of their pages. This needed for professional and commercial sites, but does your personal site have one? If you do, is it for practical purposes, or just for fun?

[asahelix]

Yes, and I guess it's for both reasons. Idk, it just kinda makes my website look a bit cleaner (or cluttered, I could be in denial about the whole thing lol). 

I just hope I'm using it properly

[littlelum]

Yes, and I guess it's for both reasons. Idk, it just kinda makes my website look a bit cleaner (or cluttered, I could be in denial about the whole thing lol). 

I just hope I'm using it properly

Yeah, it does make your site look cleaner.

As for using it "properly" I would probably add something about the content that is own by others, such as that lemmings gif.

[asahelix]

Yeah, it does make your site look cleaner.

Well, I'm glad you agree.

As for using it "properly" I would probably add something about the content that is own by others, such as that lemmings gif.

That's true. I'll add a little credits section on the website that gives proper credit to everything I've used at some point in the future. It IS scummy to just take things and use them on my site without proper credit after all. That's not the only example of potential copyright infringement on my website since I do have a Pkunk from Star Control 2 directly ripped from the game on my page lol.

[pepper]

  This isn't legal advice, I'm not a lawyer, and it only applies to the US! 

In the US, a copyright is granted automatically as soon as you create and publish a piece of art. Registering with the copyright with the government gives you extra ability to defend the work in court if you need to sue, but that's about it. From what I could tell when I looked this up when making my site for the first time, it's best to have the copyright registered legally before someone steals your work, so when you go to sue them, or ask a lawyer to send a cease and desist, or whatever, it's in the public record that it's yours, before the theft happened.

All that said, I do have a copyright notice in my site's footer, but I have not (yet!) registered the copyright, mostly because I hate dealing with bureaucracy. If I sold commissions as an artist, I would consult a lawyer, register my art with the copyright office, and have a lawyer draft up a terms of service. I'm also toying with the idea of selling darkroom prints of my photos, and I would do the same: lawyer, register, ToS.

I don't make any money off my art right now so I haven't bothered registering the copyright, but I'm sure I will eventually as I'd like to at least table at craft fairs or something.

I have the copyright notice in my site's footer just to communicate something like, "hey I know what I'm doing and my stuff is actually mine, don't steal it grrr". The last name on it is a pen name, so not my legal last name, but it still counts as a "copyright notice". If a post of mine happens to blow up on bsky or something like that, then maybe I would register the copyright sooner, but for now I don't really think anyone is trying to steal my photos and profit off my work (except genAI farming bots and GPT and the like, but they can eat farts and the copyright notice should apply to them too but I can't afford to fight that particular fight in court)

[asahelix]

This isn't legal advice, I'm not a lawyer, and it only applies to the US! 

This is still some helpful information regardless.

I have this Creative Commons License on my website. I don't wanna go through all the legal mumbo jumbo to get my stuff properly trademarked and whatnot lol. I do have in mind some terms that I'd like to apply to my work (particularly with my OCs) but I don't think now is the proper time to go through with all of it 

[Adam]

Interesting question.
I have a copyright notice on my blog, but like Pepper said, copyright is automatic in the US regardless of whether you actually use the word "copyright" anywhere.
As for as actually using (enforcing) it, I think it's unlikely that I would ever be in the situation where a human would be copying my content. Frankly, I'm not a very good writer and my content doesn't have a wide commercial appeal. 


On the other hand, I can see a potential future where some of the the big tech companies get sued more aggressively for using copyrighted material to train their LLMs. Having their LLM occasionally retain or reproduce copyright notices might make for some compelling evidence.

I can't find the story now, but about a year back there was a report that one of the big LLMs reproduced some code that included a comment along the lines of "Written by Steve Smith," immediately exposing where the LMM had stolen the content from. In the same vein, if you asked an LLM to "write a quirky blog post about why cats are the fluffiest bois" and it finished the post with ©MelonLand, it might make you pause and consider where that content is actually coming from.

[Dan Q]

The "not legal advice" above is solid

Seconding what's been said about as not-legal-advice, and broadly the same holds true in the UK and EU: copyright comes as standard - you don't need to do or say any special magic words: if you create original art then it's copyrighted.

I use a Creative Commons license

If you want something that's not just a basic catch-all copyright, that's a good reason for a footer (or if you just want to remind people not to steal, I suppose!). I license virtually everything I create on my site under a Creative Commons By-NC license, which means that people are absolutely allowed to copy anything I do and republish it so long as they (a) give me credit and (b) don't make money off it without my permission. I even have a web page to explain that to people!

I've gained so much from the Web over the decades that it "feels right" to give back to it in this way. No judgement if you feel differently on your own site, of course!

I have taken action against copyright misuse!

I've had times where people have re-used my content without proper attribution. Usually when I've reached out to them they've corrected it and credited me properly: a polite email will go a long way. There's only one instance I'm aware of where that wasn't the case and somebody was using an original image I'd created without crediting me, and wouldn't respond to my emails... but fortunately for me they'd been an idiot and hotlinked it, so I just swapped the image for one declaring itself stolen and repointed my own site to a different copy.

I've once been asked to remove content that belonged to somebody else, too. I'd received a photo from a friend alongside a recipe, and I asked if I could republish it and the friend said yes. Turns out the friend didn't take the photo! The original photographer found it and asked me to take it down, so I did (while explaining the situation i.e. that I'd used it in good faith that my friend had been telling the truth), with lots of apologising.

tl;dr: people are usually nice if you email them about copyright; in 27 years of very-active blogging I've managed to resolve everything copyright-related easily and never needed a lawyer.

[Skykristal]

I was aware of the legal advice mentioned above (applies to my country). I once saw a post/document about it and kept looking into it, and honestly thats a 10/10, big fan. One worry less. So no I actually don't write copyright on my site most of the time, but I used to do it. I actually still write it on some sites just for fun to look "professional"  but its more for deco than anything, and it doesn't apply to my website. I started including this "made with love" line at the bottom instead and kept it

[sunnyp4rk]

I do add a "Nikki 2022-*present year*" at the bottom of my pages, with a link to my network page (the main page) as well. My fanlistings have the disclaimer that it's a fan thing, but otherwise, its just the first sentence for the majority of my pages.

[xwindows]

I do, because I freely-license several things I release on my sites; especially software-- which I release under the OG copyleft license: GNU GPL. Having copyright notice makes it explicit about that, and less-risky for people to reuse my freely-licensed works.

But it is important to note that I don't really use site-global copyright notice: I have notice on every single individual projects, and each of them say different things, and refer to different legaleses; by intention.

Anyway, lately, I have been putting more and more of my non-software stuffs under traditional "Copyright (C) ..., all rights reserved" umbrella; because some morally-challenged people reposted some of my work on a site well-known to commit content-laundering crime (1) on everything uploaded there. And in the future, I also have some upcoming projects which I aim to freely-license the code and text, but not graphics; and its copyright notice will look a bit more complicated to reflect that too.

For software however, I still deem end-users' rights important, so GPL license and source code releases stay; but in newer software I'm going to release, I'd no longer provide access to VCS, and only provide old-school tarball/ZIP downloads-- which combined with other measures I have on my website, makes it require a whole new order of magnitude in effort to download mere fraction of information previously mirrorable in a single command; while still provide all the information essential to an ordinary user exercising his rights when using my software.

May those scraper mercenaries die by thousand CAPTCHAs, let those Artificial Idiots burn in wildfire of trillion dollars.


(1) I refuse to use grifter terms like "generative AI", "genAI", and such; which perpetrate false make-believe and obscure the criminal nature of such venture.

[DougsShack]

I have the following on every page.