Intellectual Property Rights for Blogs

Reading the article on ProPakistani about the copying act by some blogs from ProPakistani. I feel the need to discuss the intellectual property rights for the blogs.

Article is based on readings from:-

WIPO (World Intellectual Property Rights ORG) www.wipo.org
IPO Pakistan (Intellectual Property Organization of Pakistan) www.ipo.gov.pk

First of all let’s start with the Intellectual Property Rights. What are they?

“Intellectual property rights are the rights of the publishers, owner, producer of a true and genuine products or contents; it may be the creativity or any thing which solely belongs to one person, group or company”.

This was a general explanation of the intellectual property rights. But for the websites it may be different and especially for the blogs it is entirely different.
Websites logos, trade marks, products or some new inventions, softwares all come under the IP

For Blogs it is some what different so let’s discuss that

1-If someone finds information relating to his need from someone else’s blog so how to quote or use it?

If we quote from some ones blog or website, the Copyright Act of WIPO (world intellectual property rights) says “short quotations are fair use, but not copy right infringement. But if we are commenting or criticizing someone’s post we have a fair right to post. The law favors “transformative” Use. It is better than straight copying.

The law says that if we put even a thumbnail of some ones work in a post it is transformative. The blog Author can grant you rights through “Creative Common License”

Now let’s understand fair use in IP rights.

There is no hard rule for IP fair usage. But some points should be clear.

1-    Copying all work is not fair, But extracting and giving citations is fair use.
2-    The use of factual material is a fair use. But mentioning the Data method and origin completely.
3-    If market potential of original author is effected. It is not under the fair usage policy.

Copying from Government Portals

Works produced by Government of Pakistan, agency or person working for the government and are available in public domain can be used and copied.

Note: – Public domain means available to general public through any media.

Free to quote ideas and facts

We can report the factual data or idea embodied from another websites, personal and blog etc. copy rights only protects expressions but not the facts with the fair use.
(Proper Citation Needed)

Deep linking to someone’s blog post or websites

Most of the bloggers and websites are happy to have other websites linked to them. “Permalink “is the direct link to someone’s blog post. Some Bloggers complain that links that leads readers to internal pages on website steal the traffic and interrupt the flow of parent website.

But law says that deep linking is not copy right infringement. Many Companies don’t like this concept but law permits it.

Can Blog License their Posts

This is in consideration to blogs and especially ProPakistani situation. It is important to discuss.

The answer to this is “yes” Blogs can license their post through creative common license
Creative common licenses provide a standard way to authors to reserve the rights to declare their work “some rights reserved “instead of all rights reserved. If the source one is quoting has CCL (creative common license).

One can use it. But first one has to confirm what license permits it to do.

So CCL provides several sharing and copying licenses with legal codes , computer codes or human readable declaration  or graphics.

So ProPakistani can use CCL in their posts and if someone wants to use more than the license permits they can contact ProPakistani.

Finally the rights for comments for the readers

When reader’s comment for public display, they are probably giving rights to at least display the comments. If Blogs or Pro Pakistani wants to make things clear they can add CCL to the posts, so that writers agree to the license.

These above mentioned was a brief outlook of how copyrights work for blogs or some what websites. This article is open for discussions. So Comment on this to give your views.