As a blogger you are a most influential person, you are a change agent, you are a situation creator, you are a trend maker and you are an advertiser. Hence you have to follow the law of your country, and you must have your trademark and legal status of your blog or website. As a lawyer I would like to discuss the legal tips for bloggers. These are the legal blogging tips for new bloggers as well as those who are not aware about legal status of their blogs/websites.
Contents of the Article
Fact of legal status
The main fact of the legal status of your blog/website and trademark of your brand will keep you safe from risk as well as it will protect you and your readers too. As a blogger (trend maker and most influenced person) you must have legal status of your business (blog).
Legal Status
This is one entity status and the legal status is the status which the law determines. As you have National Identity Card, Passport, Marriage Certificate, Citizenship, Work Permit, Driving License, etc these are your legal status. If you could drive a car without driving license, then how you can publish your contents without any legal status.
Why is legal status important?
Everyone of us is well aware about citizen and non-citizen of our own countries, and the citizenship law of our own countries. There are many kinds of permanent as well as temporary words like citizen, aliens, immigrants, non-immigrants, refugees, muhajir, sharnarthi etc are being used in our countries for the legal importance of peoples. If you have a legal status then you can move, work, purchase and sell property, owning assets, and business legally otherwise you can do anything.
Legal tips for bloggers
As a blogger you are an online business owner and your website / blog is your own business. Online business have so many risks as like use of your contents for any other purpose, someone can steal your contents, your logo, business name, etc if you would like to keep you safe from all these risks you follow below described the key legal tips for bloggers from a lawyer to legally protect your website.
Protect your blog name with registered trademark
The name of your blog, website must be unique with strong legal justification which keep you legally safe from all violations. It important to do a specific research before choosing the name of your blog. That research will guide that which name should be selected and which is not good for your niche. Never choose the similar type of name of your blog like “A Cup of Jhangi” it is the similar to world top lifestyle blog “A Cup of Jo”.
You must choose the expressive name rather than descriptive name of your blog. The names like “Tena’s Fashion Tips” or “Tena’s Baking Tips” are the descriptive so don’t choose this type of names. Name must be creative and unique. In different countries like my country and also USA the descriptive countries could not be protected by trademark. The name must suggest and give a perfect idea about your niche and what type of contents you are sharing.
The google search engine, intellectual property registry list, trademark registry list, business registry list, and especially in USA US Patent and trademark TESS database are the main sources to verifying for your blog name.
After verifying the name, you have to check the availability of domain. If the domain is not available it means anyone else is using unregistered business with the same name. In this situation you must avoid to use same name with different spelling or acronyms.
If the domain is available than you must go ahead with your selected name and purchase the domain, I am using GoDaddy which is very much reliable site for domain purchasing.
Necessary documents and writeup
Congratulations! You have selected a unique name for your blog and purchased domain and hosting (A2Hosting is good and reliable), now let us discuss some important pages for your blog or website. Following pages are the legal requirement of any blog or website;
Basic blogging tips for new bloggers
- About
- Disclaimer
- Privacy Policy
About:
You have to write a summarized introduction of your website, also you can publish a detail profile of your blog/website.
Disclaimer:
A strong and professional disclaimer notice is necessary for your blog, it is like a legalshield of your website from legal liability. Disclaimer page will notify your visitors, users that your company will not be held responsible for any losses that could occur from accessing your company. It also protects you from legal claims if your site is ecommerce site.
Privacy Policy:
If you are collecting any personal information of visitors like name, email, location, IP address, etc than your blog is required a privacy policy by law. The privacy policy of your blog will inform your bloggers that why are you collecting some personal information of visitors, how that will be confidential.
If you are publishing any sponsored contents or affiliate marketing, you must disclose it and add it in the bottom or top of the post. All these three most important pages of your blog must be published in footer or top header menu.
The privacy policy of your blog must cover the E-mail marketing under the CAN-SPAM Act.
- Your compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- Children’s Policy
- Cookies and comments policy
Copyright
It is the intellectual property law; this law is defending your authorship of original research and contents. It will provide you the automatic copyright protection right of your research work and created contents. The copyright legislation covers any visible work including your videos, photographs, blog posts, designs, e-books, drawings and paintings, etc. No one can use your contents without your permission or giving credits if you have allowed it.
According to my country, the Copyright law is governed by the Copyright Ordinance 1962, which is modelled on the English Act of 1914. (The period of copyright of a published literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work (other than a photograph) is the life of the author and 50 years after his death).
Don’t use copyright contents and don’t allow anyone to use your contents including images, drawings, photographs and templates, etc.
Some site allows you to re-use their work including images, photographs, videos and contents by giving them accurate credit. You can download free images and photos by searching free high-resolution images.
Use Original Content
Use your original contents never publish other’s ideas and contents without any agreement or permission. You can publish guest pots with proper in written agreement with writer.
Follow these “blogging tips for new bloggers”. You must get permission and include it with the work like photo, music, video, or contents which you have not created. Here are some sites like Unsplash, Shutter Stock, Getty Images, Creative Market, etc which are giving permission to download free photos and re-use.
Conclusion
These are the legal blogging tips for new bloggers. If these are useful for you than follow these. You must follow the law of your country, follow the law in which you are affiliated/ like Google AdSense, Affiliate Marketing. To be a good citizen and keep your blog safe from all illegal activities.
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Last Updated: August 07, 2020
Oh wow, all this is great information to know. I didn’t know the legal side of the things and will start to implement this information onto my blog soon! Sharing this with my blogger friends.
I am glad I have these pages on my blog. I agree that we should always follow what the laws say so we will not be in trouble in the future.
This is very useful information and definitely something we must make sure we’re adhering to as bloggers. Are templates a good option for the privacy policies and such?
Yea, templates are the good option, but you must review carefully and update according to your requirements.
These are all perfect legal tips! I am fortunate to be working with a company that gave us a checklist of all of these things to do to keep our sites safe.
These are really important points to consider especially as blogging community is an ever growing community!
Great legal tips for those who are newbies like me! Every blogger needs to consider all these points.
Very informative posts! Good thing I have the About Me, Disclaimer, and Privacy Policy in place for my own blog. It’s not the most exciting part about blogging, I must admit, but new and old bloggers should know these legal matters. So thanks for sharing this!
I didn’t even know some of these things and I have been blogging for 15 years now.
This is very helpful. I will have to update some parts myself after reading this. Thank you for sharing!
Great information for bloggers! I knew about some things you mentioned, but you definitely gave me new info that I will be putting to good use.
This is SO helpful. It’s definitely good to know the legalities BEFORE getting into blogging so you’re prepared.
Such a great reminder as things have changed since I initially set up my blog! Thanks for the advice!
These are a great reminder for us many bloggers. Having these done is also considered part of the asset of your blog.
I don’t have my name trademarked, but in my country you don’t really need to. There are laws that protect your brand even without a trademark registration. Some names you can’t even trademark, if they are too generic.
As a blogger, I find this information really helpful! I didn’t know some of these before, so I’m thankful that you shared these with us!
These are very helpful for new bloggers like me! Thank you very much
This post was a much needed one. As a blogger, I feel it’s so important to know the legality of the blogging sphere!
Thank you, I found this all so useful. It can be hard to figure out the legal side of blogging, especially when it comes to trademarking! I found this out the hard way.
I have been looking into trademarking my blog. I also have been thinking about investing in stock images instead of using free images. I always feel like it’s so many other websites using the same free images as me and sometimes it doesn’t make my website stand out.
There are so many things to learn. The legal world has many layers for sure. It’s good to read about these.
Your subject is factual. We agree with you. To protect your blog name with a registered trademark. Because nowadays there is a lot of hackers and illegal site. I have lots of learning in your articles.
Those are great tips – I am gonna read them again later to see if I have done all I need for my blog 🙂
These are helpful tips for all bloggers and we do the best we can with the information we have. Copyright infringement is a big issue so most of us are aware of that…
I don’t know how I came up with my blog name but I really think it’s unique.i try my all means to protect my content so I turned off copy and paste and I do put my website URL on images.
I pinned this. Bloggers need to protect themselves legally.
This is really helpful. Thank you. I have saved it for implementation.
Oh thanks for these tips. I will share this to my family and clients. Thanks for sharing.
These are really helpful legal tips for bloggers. As a blogger, our love and enthusiasm for writing knows no bounds and we start writing before giving too much thought to other areas such as legal aspects! So thank you so much for your tips.
Awesome, thank you for the great information. ?