Protecting your creative work on blogs

Anyone who writes a blog knows the many hours put into writing, photographing and editing creative content to post. It's then very important to give this effort a little protection.  I'm in no way saying that we should be slapping copyrights on everything we produce, because (1) the copyright system is very complex and (2) it then becomes very time consuming and expensive to pursue.

There is a simple way that we can add some protection to our work in the form of a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that has created free, easy to use licenses to add to your blog or website pages via a html code that is built for you.  There are 6 different licenses which you build to suit how you would like others to use your work.  You may decide that people can share, edit and alter your work as long as they mention you as the creator or you can state that your work is not to be used for commercial works even if you are credited.  The choice is yours.  

Personally, my blog The Haby Goddess is not only a lead to my online store (yes that is a very important part of it I will admit!) it is also about sharing content via my tutorials, craft related articles and showcasing of other crafters work. This work is published via the blog with the intent of it been shared, I have absolutely no problems with others taking my content and photographs and sharing it with others - but I do appreciate that I am fully credited as being the original creator.  And in most cases this does apply as us crafters are a very nice bunch -aren't we?I hope this information has given you some food for thought and helps towards protecting your content & creations.

Below is a short video for Creative Commons & a fantastic podcast link from Crafty Pod. 
A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

Crafty Pod - Creative Commons Licensing with Martin Ertl and Kim Werker

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