Web Writing — Part Seven, Crediting and Creative Commons

Crediting

In Part Six, we looked at legal issues around posting on your blog. A highly important aspect of blogging or web work is giving credit where it is due. This relates to any form of media content. You can’t just copy a paragraph or scrape a film, because that content is somebody’s copyright. Try to get written permission or a licence to use material. If you can’t manage it, paraphrase, quote a line with attribution and discuss your own point of view. Or go and take your own photo.

Credit images and any graphs you didn’t make yourself. You can make your own graphs with Excel. Credit where you got the information, like highest grossing movies of 2019, and provide a link to their site. Canva can help you make infographics. These are a great way to make figures more digestible and take them out of the paragraph.

Electric car parking and charging space. You may not need to go far to get your own images. Photo by Clare O’Beara.

Sometimes you see excellent graphic effects like a magnifying glass over a photo, that follows your mouse. This will have been made by a graphic artist and that person should be credited.

If you are publishing work by various authors or photographers, each contributor’s name should be a tag on that page.

Generally, I list multiple authors of one piece alphabetically by surname. Academics and scientists use this style because it stops them arguing over who is more important. But editorial policy may require a lead author, and other authors listed as researchers at the end.

Wildflower meadow at Trinity College, Dublin. Photo by Clare O’Beara.

Creative commons

Several degrees of creative commons exist. One is licenced free to use in any way, with no credit to the creator. Another is free to use with credit. Another is free to reproduce in the same form, so you can lift an image from a website, place it on a website, but you can’t put it on a t-shirt. You can’t sell a mug or bumper sticker with this image.

Jim Fitzpatrick is an Irish artist who creates Celtic art. He also created the iconic image of Che Guevara, after an iconic photo which had been taken. He decided to make this image free to reproduce provided it was never sold. So, if you buy a t-shirt with his art work of Che on it, you are buying a shirt, not the image.

Phil Lynott statue off Grafton St., Dublin. Photo by Clare O’Beara.

Many image libraries now say images are free to look at online, but you cannot reproduce or sell them. You can find images on Unsplash which are often free to use with credit. NASA images are free to use as NASA is a government body and has an educational purpose. You’ll probably have to shrink them. Online it is possible to do a reverse image search and find where an image has been previously posted.

Copyright theft can happen to you. Suppose you put material on a shared site, and one day you find the owner of the site has replaced your name with his or hers everywhere. The longer you let it go on, the more it looks like you allowed this situation. If you can’t correct the website, my advice is immediately to place all your work on another platform — like a Wordpress or Medium site — with proper accreditation. Take back your ownership. Don’t go on a rant on social media, just take the steps a professional takes to protect their copyright. As part of this, I don’t recommend writing directly onto a website. Keep the original on your computer. If the site vanishes or gets hacked, or your article is altered by someone sharing the site, you need to have the original material.

Read the other articles in this series, including covering a conference and providing professional content for a site or blog.