Licensing Your Works

Intellectual property is not something new to everyone nowadays. We often can see lots of case going on in the newspaper saying AAA sueing BBB for violated their patterns or etc.

But many people do not know that what you publish online, such as blog articles, or softwares or anything, you can name it, is also eligible to file for a license.

What is the advantage for file a license of you work? The answer is very simple, to protect your rights on the work you did, to avoid people use your articles and put in their own website and claim as theirs without giving you any credits. Remember, blogs are also eligible to file for copyrights! So to those people who like to plagiarize other people’s stuff, make sure you see there is no such thing as copyrights footers or Creative Common logo in that site. If you ignore, you will surely get the punishment that you deserve for being a copy cat! Yes! I am talking about you! Bitch! Damn you for copy other people’s blog’s title to write a blog post and craps you write at you blog which inspired (modified version of the original ones) from other people’s article and say that is your fucking original idea! (To others, I think you might know who I am talking about, if you don’t know, just ignore this.)

As you can see at the right navigation area of this blog, there is a Creative Common logo with its copyright notes tag is placed there to protect my rights on my own articles. Although things that I write might be not interesting, but at least it is a way to practice on using the intellectual property rights.

There is another blog which is in my blog roll is also using Creative Common to protect her work. You can see from here.

Now I will write about the tutorial on how to put this Creative Common copyright into your blog. There will be tutorials on placing it on WordPress blog and Blogspot blog.

Step 1: File a copyrights license for your blog

1. Go to http://creativecommons.org/license don’t worry, it is free.
2. Fill up the necessary information where what rights you wan on your blogs.
3. Allow commercial uses of your work? Choose No, so that no one can use what you write and earn from it without giving you royalty.
4. Allow modifications of your work? Choose No, it is dangerous for allow people to modify it and put it in other place. They might modify it and twist the fact, hence make you get into certain trouble.
5. Jurisdiction of your license Choose your own country name.
6. Tell us the format of your work: Select Interactive, since you will have text, picture and might even have videos in you articles.
7. Title of work Put your blog’s title, for example “Kao Sai CiBai Area!”
8. Attribute work to name You can put either your full name or your online nickname
9. Attribute work to URL out your blog’s address here such as http://kaosaicibai.blogspot.com
10. Source work URL You can leave this empty since blog articles is based on what appears in you mind. For certain articles that your idea is inspired from other blog, you can just put the credits line in that certain articles, no need to fill up this part.
11. More permissions URL You can link it to your profile page so that people able to get your email to contact you for using your work for specific usage which need your written permission.
12. Now, click the Select a License button to go to the next page.
13. Now you have submitted you license registration, you have 3 different logo to choose for using it at your blog, just click any of it which you like.
14. Finally, copy the codes which had generated and paste in a text editor file to save the codes.

Step 2: Placing the codes in your blog
Here comes the important part, this is where you will learn to put the codes into your blog for people to view and know that your work is copyrighted.

For WordPress Blogs

1. Login into your WordPress blog admin panel, click Design, then go to Widgets
2. Now in the list for adding widgets, click the Text widget and drag its placing which you want. For this, I recommend you to put it at the bottom of the side navigation bar.
3. Click the Edit link of that widget, then fill up the title as “Copyrights” on the titlebar area.
4. Now, copy and paste the codes that you saved just now into the text area of the widget, then click Change.
5. Finally, click Save Changes. Now you will able to see the copyright note is appear at your navigation bar.

For Blogspot Blogs

1. Of course, you have to login to your blogspot account and go to your blog’s control panel.
2. Click Layout, the click the Page Elements.
3. In the Page Elements page, you will see a frame which it is mimic you blog’s layout.
4. Since we are going to locate the copyright note at a visible area, we will add a widget to the side navigation bar.
5. To do so, just click Add a Gadget at the side navigation bar area. A popup will appear, then you should choose the HTML/JavaScript.
6. Then it will bring you to the next page of that popup page.
7. At the title, fill up the text Copyright. Then copy and paste the codes you saved just now into the Content area.
8. Now, click the Save button.
9. The widget is not appear in the preview layout of the blog, but it is not don yet.
10. Drag that widget to the location that you want. For this, I recommend you to put it at the bottom of the side navigation bar.
11. Finally, click the Save button at the top right of that layout preview frame to save your settings.
12. Now, you will able to see your copyright note appear at the side navigation bar of your blog.

The code of the copyright note can be edit to make it looks more neat, you may add the align codes into it if you know how to do so. Your rights will still remain even if you edited the alignment of your copyright note. Just in case you screwed up the code, you can always copy and paste back the code that you had saved earlier.