Here is a common scenario: You are a business owner who wants visibility on the internet but has little time to allocate towards marketing activities. Therefore, you hire a professional marketing firm to generate your blogs. One day you happen to notice a blog on a competitor’s site that is very similar to the one your marketing firm generated for your business. When you question the marketing firm, it proudly announces that the firm writes for the competitor’s business and sometimes re-circulate materials between clients in the same industry. The firm does not understand why you are upset because the firm owns the material. You contact an attorney to find out who owns your blog.

In general, ownership issues for the contents of blogs are looked at in the same way as more traditional ownership issues. Typically, the author retains ownership of the contents of the blog unless the contents thereof were created in the course of his or her employment, or as part of a larger work that is covered by a separate agreement, in which cases it falls under the category of “work for hire” and ownership is thereby assigned to the party which contracted the work. In order to minimize future conflict, it is always best to sort out ownership issues prior to executing the contract.

Another common issue — and one which causes many headaches — is after your blog has hit the internet, you receive a cease-and-desist letter from a company stating that your blog infringes on its copyrighted material and uses trademarks without authorization. This is not a great way to promote your company. Prior to entering into an agreement with a professional marketing firm, you should make sure the agreement contains protective language whereby the marketing firm represents and warrants that it will not use the copyrighted materials and trademarks of others without their permission and that the marketing firm will indemnify you in the event you are accused of infringement.

All too often, people think that because something is online, it means it is part of the public domain and therefore, its use is not restricted. This is not so. Even if there is no copyright notice posted on a work, or the use of the work is not for personal gain, it is important for both you and any marketing professionals you may hire to follow these guidelines:

1. Obtain permission to use the material from the copyright holder prior to using it.
2. Always give credit to the source of the information.
3. Never copy the entire copyrighted work regardless of what type of work it is. It is better to provide a link to the entire work rather than including all of the work or a large portion thereof in your blog.
4. If you want to comment, review or critique a work, use only a short excerpt from the work and incorporate it into the section of your critique or comment relating thereto.

Happy Blogging!