An article on Freelance Writing Jobs claims that dealing with copyright is easy. If only it were! The Internet and copyright laws make it difficult both to enforce your copyrights and to tell if you’re violating someone else’s.
Is it in copyright?
Suppose you want to quote extensively from an existing piece or use a graphic from it. Is it in copyright? If it’s a recent work, probably it is, even if it doesn’t carry a copyright notice. Just the act of creating a work in the United States gives you a copyright over it. This includes works under most open source and Creative Commons licenses. The copyright holder owns the work but gives you permission to use it. There may be conditions attached. That’s not the same as being in the public domain.
Copyrights eventually expire, but it’s hard to tell whether they have. As of June 2019, anything published before 1924 is in the public domain. If it was published in 1924 or later, you have to do more research. The maximum possible term for a copyright is 95 years, but some expire earlier. At one time, copyrights had to be renewed, and those that weren’t fell into the public domain. Different kinds of copyright have had different durations.
There’s another catch. If a work produced before 1924 has been substantially modified, it might still be copyrighted. For example, many restored and cleaned-up versions of pre-1924 movies are copyrighted. There should be a copyright notice in the work or on its packaging in these cases.
Securing your own copyright
If you publish your own work and identify yourself as its creator, you have a copyright on it. Anyone who publishes a copy without your permission is violating the copyright. This sounds simple, but there are exceptions here too. When you publish to a website run by someone else, you might be assigning your copyright. What’s more common is that you’re granting the site permission to do anything they want with your work, including publishing it in any form, translating it into other languages, and putting ads on it. It’s all in the terms of service which you probably didn’t read. If you want exclusive control, you’re better off publishing to your own website.
Changing the words around doesn’t circumvent copyright. It just makes it harder to be caught. Some people use software to take existing articles and change the words so that plagiarism checkers won’t catch them. That’s doubly dishonest, using someone else’s work and concealing the fact. Just by the way, using software to plug in synonyms and change word order around produces garbage articles. The bottom-feeders of the Internet don’t care.
If you’re doing work for hire, it’s the customer’s problem. You’ve been paid, and the customer gets all the rights. You can’t make copyright claims and don’t need to.
Unless you’ve assigned the copyright itself, you retain any rights you haven’t assigned. Enforcing them isn’t easy, though. Pirates in some countries know their governments won’t do anything. Others just put stuff up till they’re caught then move somewhere else. Legal action is expensive, and it can be like playing whack-a-mole.
One thing you can do at no cost is file a DMCA takedown request with the hosting site. It isn’t hard, and it may get results. Make sure your complaint is accurate. You could theoretically be charged with perjury for making a false report. (Not that this ever happens to big companies that issue frivolous takedown notices.)
It’s a lot to figure out. Fortunately, unless you’re making a lot of money from it, you aren’t likely to get into serious trouble for unintentional infringement. Usually you’ll just have to pull what you’ve published off the market. You could lose a valuable customer, though, so try to be careful.