As content marketers, we get excited about sharing content. From articles and videos to blog posts and photos, we live to spread content love.
Many of us, however, are unaware that the content we share is protected by copyright. In fact, every time someone creates a piece of content, it automatically gets a copyright. That's why we need to be careful about what we share and how we share it.
According to the 2013 Information Consumption and Use Study conducted by research and advisory firm Outsell Inc., more than 40% of the information employees use and share comes from outside sources.* Over half of those surveyed in the same study either didn't know whether their organization had a copyright policy or didn't know what was in it.
Spreading copyright-protected material across the Internet and even within your own organization can increase your organization's risk of infringement.
So, how exactly are we sharing copyrighted materials? According to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America study, marketers use a number of tactics to build awareness and generate leads:
- Social media
- Articles on your company's website
- E-newsletters
- Blogs
- In-person events
- Videos
- Articles on other sites
- Whitepapers
- Online presentations
- Webinars or webcasts
- Infographics
Although those tactics are popular, and everybody employs them, you still need to consider the source of the content fueling each of them.
Is the content produced in-house? Are you working with freelance writers, designers, or photographers? If you hire freelancers, make sure they grant you the right to use their work as you see fit. That right may seem obvious, since you're paying them for their work; but, just in case, have them put a permission clause in their contracts.
And whenever you take materials from a third-party source—such as excerpting an article from a journal in your blog post or placing an image that you found online in your webinar slide deck—you should get copyright permission from the rightsholder, whether that's a publisher, author, photographer, or other holder of the copyright.
Is the Content-Sharing I'm Doing 'Fair Use'?
To help you better understand the do's and don'ts of responsible content sharing, I spoke with Michele Ayers, Manager of Educational Services at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a global thought leader on copyright and content licensing issues.
"One of the biggest misconceptions that marketers have about sharing protected content is the belief that all of the content sharing they do is considered fair use," Ayers pointed out.
A concept originating in, and still almost unique to, the US, fair use recognizes that certain uses of other people's copyright-protected works do not require the copyright holder's authorization. In those instances, the use is presumed slight enough that it does not interfere with the copyright holder's exclusive rights to reproduce and reuse the work.
Fair use refers primarily to the use of the copyright-protected work for commentary, parody, news reporting, research, and education.
"To use fair use as a defense against a copyright infringement claim," Ayers said, "you must weigh the four factors found in Section 107 of the US Copyright Act and determine that, on balance, the four factors taken together indicate that your use is likely fair." These are those factors:
- The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright-protected work as a whole
- The effect of the use on the potential market for the copyright-protected work or on the value of the work
"All of those factors must be weighed together against the facts in each case, as what applies one time may not apply the next, depending on how, where, and why you use the content," Ayers said.