Another interesting seminar today (with free lunch, which is always appreciated by us poor law students. There is a direct correlation between advertising pizza and increased seminar attendance.) At this seminar an experienced copyright attorney discussed her studies of copyright ‘norms’ practiced by the blogosphere. She believes that these norms (unregulated and perhaps unwritten rules that have become standard practice among bloggers), which have largely been empirically documented, should play some role in guiding future copyright reform.

There were two points I wanted to bring up. First, when she listed 10 or so types of blogs, there was mention of “mommy blogs,” but nothing about “daddy blogs.” We have a long way to go to catch up to the Mommy blogs!

Second, and of course much more importantly, her talk made me think about the copyright norms that I practice when blogging. She mentioned that the blogosphere is a huge laboratory for studying copyright norms because of the ability to track content. Linking, trackbacks, comments, and search engines are all methods employed to monitor content. When I write posts, I always try to provide links to sources of information or interesting sites (ingrained perhaps by my education in science, where credit is an important facet of writing). Recently, I discussed a New York Times series called “Broken Bench.” In my post I included a short section of the article so that I could highlight what I considered to be some important points. I have to admit that when I did that, I took a brief moment to decide whether I could or should do so. A factor in my decision, undoubtedly, was that there is little chance that the New York Times would ever find my post, and if they did, I don’t receive enough traffic to make it worth their while to litigate. But as per usual, I provided numerous links back to the original article - failure to do so, in my mind, would have constituted a blatant copyright infringement.

In my [many] hours reading blogs, a rough framework has evolved and formed in my head that guides my actions when posting. I believe that most legitimate bloggers always credit their sources with a link, as that creates a positive environment that will eventually reward the ‘linker’ when he becomes the ‘linkee’. Additionally, when a blogger brings an interesting site or video clip or new story to the reader’s attention, that reader tends to acknowledge the original blogger when posting the site or video to their own blog.

So anyway, to make a long story short, before this seminar I hadn’t given my own blogging norms much conscious attention. I think that being made aware of these unwritten norms will only help me be a better blogger. By the way, I found a great guide for bloggers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, if you have any questions about copyright or your rights as a blogger.

Just a final question - when blogging, what constitutes copyright infringement to you? Other than blatant content-stealing, what norms do you dislike seeing violated?