And thank you for the kind words.

You are one of my heroines now. Anyone who blogs about protecting our copyrights makes the world a better place in my thinking.

Once you have published anything, be it in print or on the web, photographed it, recorded it, or set it in a “fixed” form, it is copyrighted according to US and international copyright laws. What you choose to do with it is up to you.

You can give it away. You can keep it totally for yourself. Or you can share it, but you have to define how much “sharing” is permitted, as part of the Fair Use aspect of copyright law.

Assume everything on the Internet is copyrighted. Ask first. That’s always the safest way to go.

Never assume your blog is safe. Scrapers and content thieves don’t care what your blog is about. They just want the content to stuff ads into and around. Some think they are doing the world a favor by scraping blog feeds to create mass collections of information (called aggregators), so they go after anything and everyone.

Gardeners are not exempt. You would be surprised at the boring blogs they steal content from. I’m always stunned when they take my stuff. I don’t think my stuff is that interesting to most people.

And thanks for speaking out on this very important issue! We need to spread the word.