InformationWeek: People are starting Weblogs in growing numbers, but the owner of the content isn’t always clear.
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“For companies that require blogging as a function of an employee’s job, the issues of ownership and oversight are easier to establish. The content typically belongs to the employer in the same way that work-related E-mail does, and the Weblogs can be monitored and even edited. Increasingly, however, people are writing Weblogs on subjects closely related to their jobs, yet without official endorsements from their employers. Such sites can fall into a “fuzzy, gray area” of copyright law, says Cydney Tune, an intellectual-property lawyer with law firm Pillsbury Winthrop.
Ownership is important because Weblog material has both potential value and liability. “I would think the employer would want to own the content,” Tune says. “As a general rule, it’s better for employers to own everything that the employee creates because you never know when it’s going to become important to your business.””
“… Blogger Bob Roudebush, a Microsoft employee who writes a personal Weblog, takes his concerns a step further: “Copyrights are going to kill Weblogs as we know them. Plain and simple,” he wrote in a posting on the RSS-feed debate. In a follow-up E-mail exchange, Roudebush says, “As we start to consume information in different ways, it becomes very hard to tell how content is being licensed (protected) and what rights I have to use it.””
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
