Basically, if you write something on your blog, it’s yours. Many countries’ legislature recognises this, and protects your copyright. So, are you safe now? Well, not exactly. I found two excellent tools to help you protect your blog articles’ copyright.

Though you are safe in principle because of general copyright protection by law, there are two peculiarities when it comes to copyright protection on blogs. First of all, you can easily re-date posts on your blog. But, this means that others can do so as well when they steal your blog articles. This is where MyFreeCopyright.com comes in. The service from MyFreeCopyright.com is very simple: once you sign up, your RSS-feed is scanned for new articles, to which a unique identifier is assigned. These keys and the text from your articles are stored in a central archive, and you receive an e-mail containing the identifier for your own administration. Having that, and of course the date on which it was created, you can always prove that an article is yours, and that you wrote it prior to the date that someone else claims to have.

The second problem on the web is to find infringements of your copyright. Doing this yourself on the massive web, and doing so repeatedly, is virtually impossible. So, Copyrightspot.com does this for you. Still in early stages of development, the functionality is very basic, but very effective. You enter the URL of your blog, and then the servers of Copyrightspot.com scourge the internet to find (pieces of) the articles that originate on your blog. Very soon, you’ll find yourself confronted with a list of web-sites that have copied (parts) of the text on your blog. Unfortunately, you can’t create an account (yet? Remember that it is still in early development), so no information on prior queries can be stored. This means, that when repeat your search for copyright infringement, you’ll need to go over the same infringements again and again. This is especially burdensome when you allow specific sites to mirror your content. Very welcome features for new versions would be to create an account to save the results of your searches, the possibility to exclude specific sites from the search, and to tag specific infringements that were found as ‘OK’.

Overall, the combination of MyfreeCopyright.com and Copyrightspot.com provides a valuable aid in protecting your blog’s content. Copyrightspot.com finds infringements of your copyright, and MyFreeCopyright.com helps you to prove that the content is actually yours. So, if you’re serious about blogging, I’d say go and sign up and start using these free services.