WordPress have released a new feature to help their bloggers ‘reblog’ posts that they find interesting. When the ‘like and reblog’ feature was announced at the beginning of June, it caused quite a lot of discussion, with comments ranging from the unreservedly enthusiastic that typically greet all new features to the downright negative accompanied by requests for an opt-out option.
The main problem seems to be one of copyright concerns. The majority of bloggers are not professional writers and don’t realise – or choose to ignore – the fact that, simply put, all writing belongs exclusively to the author or, after his death, to his estate, unless assigned otherwise. Copying and pasting someone else’s text is a form of stealing.
Of course copyright law is far more complex than that. The duration of copyright varies between countries – 70 years in the UK and USA, 50 in Canada – and there are exceptions for texts published in the twentieth century when the law was changing and copyright needed to be explicitly renewed. The issue of fair use is another potential quagmire: what exactly counts as ‘a significant portion’ of a text? How much does a text need to be changed in order for it to be considered an original work? These are questions probably best left for the lawyers.
The point with the WordPress ‘reblog’ option is that it allows a blogger to mark a post he finds on someone else’s blog and cite it on his own. In a couple of clicks you can be using someone else’s material on your blog. Clearly some people object to this, and I think some find particularly worrying the idea of the new ‘Posts I Like’ tab: this apparently aggregates all the posts you have flagged as ‘like’ across WordPress and it’s described as follows:
Instead of this just being a list of post titles, we fetch the whole post content along with any media so that you can use this tab as a place to browse any of the posts you like at a later date.
I suppose that information is only visible to you, personally, via your dashboard, but it does rather sound as if it’s likely to limit the number of people who go back and re-read a post in situ.
There’s no getting around the fact that many people already cut and paste other people’s work onto their own blogs without any acknowledgement of the source or author, and it’s pretty much impossible to know if your writing has been plagiarised. (Even if full attribution is given, there are still moral and legal objections to complete texts being used elsewhere without permission.) At least with the reblog option, only a snippet of the text is posted rather than the whole piece, which may count as fair use. What’s more, an automatic connection back is generated, which could lead more readers to visit the blog that’s being quoted and read the original in its proper context.
Although I have major reservations about copying other people’s work, and am not sure that all the details of the feature have been thought through sufficiently, I think I have to accept that reblogging may be an acceptable way of quoting other WordPress writers. I hope that some of the people who reuse others’ material will find this method so easy that they will cease the simple C&P method, and the original authors will actually benefit from their own efforts.
One thing that still bothers me, though, is that the button is labelled ‘like’. It’s such a pusillanimous word and that isn’t the way bloggers tend to be. One of the keys to successful blogging is controversy, and most of us are just as likely to want to quote something we disagree with. I’d rather see the button labelled ‘mark’ or ‘note’.
For more information about copyright, see:
- Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States
- The WATCH File: Writers, Artists and Their Copyright Holders
