How Copyright Laws Fail Us When We Need Them Most
Friday, September 10th, 2010
I used to worry about other people stealing my work. I do lots of different kinds of things so there is plenty to steal. In 35 years of being in business, I have produced plenty of exceptional photos, illustrations, graphic design, ads, websites, printed collateral material, logos, music and writing, to name just a few. And of course, I also have plenty of clients for all my competition to try to steal away from me as well. This is normal. If you are talented in any way, or in business of any kind, people steal from you.
What about copyright laws? Unless you want to waste lots of money hiring a lawyer to chase after every thief and take them to court only to get a judgement against them which they probably will never pay, what is the use? And that’s if you’re lucky. Most of the time in cases of Internet violation, you can never even locate the person responsible, let alone convict him of the crime. But it’s not money I’m after. If I were, why in heaven’s name would I be writing articles for Internet article directories who don’t pay for use of their articles? I write for such sites to get the benefit of linkbacks for my website and blog. What are linkbacks? They are a vital component of SEO (search engine optimization), as links back to my website from highly ranked, popular websites, which contributes to my achieving page one search results for my own website when appropriate keywords are searched on Google. It’s complicated but it works.
For those of us who create websites, no longer do we write text to please our clients, or even to please our readers. No, we now write text to attract the search engines. Every word we use now is calculated, analyzed, and determined by the effect it will have on SEO or search ranking. A client recently emailed me to say that we didn’t need a couple of paragraphs I had so cleverly worked into the home page text and to remove them. Not one to argue with a client, I did so but explained that those paragraphs were there for the benefit of the search engines. I’m sure he wondered what I meant but he did not ask and I sadly resigned myself to his inevitable poorer ranking.
