Bloggers Legal Issues That You Should Understand To Avoid Problems

The facts and analysis drawn on this article are intended to enlighten some must-know blogger’s legal issues rather than hard and straightforward legal terms and consideration for professional bloggers. Depending on the countries and types of blogs you are running, legal terms and regulations might vary.

We encouraged you to contact the local attorney for any further conflict and issues regarding the laws and regulation persists in your country.

However, there are way more common ethical issues for professional bloggers to be well accepted in the blogging community.

Here are some very important and must know blogger’s legal issues before publishing any content publicly on your blog. Breaching laws and written or verbal ethical guidelines of blogging will price you more in the future if you want to pursue your carrier in this field.

Must-Know Bloggers Legal Issues for Professional Blogging

Content Writing

If a blog is not related to e-commerce or any specific conversion website, content is the central backbone of every blog. The very straight legal issue that you must understand regarding the content is that you cannot copy, rewrite, and steal the core idea of any blog post or article already published on the web. Unless it is not the universal fact of any researched or experimental issues, the body of the content must not come up with the same phenomena of practice and have the same bodily structure.

However, you are free to have the same topic for any blog post or article already published on the web. The idea here is that you cannot straight copy, rewrite and rearrange the previously published content on the web on your blog post.

Let’s suppose if you are writing an article on the topic of “How to Free Up Space in iPhone.”

Your topic of the article on your blog might be the same, but how you write your body part of the blog post must not have the same vocabulary, sentence structure, and topic flow.

If you are writing the content on the same topic, based on experimental or illustrations that were already performed, you should contact the publisher of the source. Even if they allow to reproduce the content based on their experiment or illustration, you should provide the attribution link to the source of the content as per the guidelines of the original producer.

If you come up with your unique way to free up space in iPhone, in that scenario, you will be the source of content for that process, and you can confidently publish the article publicly.

Legal Issues in Copyright

As we mentioned some ideas regarding the copyright legal issues in the previous section, copyright law is a life-saving aspect for professional blogging. It protects the ownership of source text content, image, video, or audio file. Copyright content cannot be stolen or misused on any web platform.

There are several copyright licenses with various restrictions on how the copyrighted material can be used in your blog. For example, finding the images for your blogs, many royalty-free licensed images fall under the Creative Commons licenses; those you are free to use in your blogs in binding with the terms and attribution condition mentioned in the source.

In some instances, you can copy the phrase or some words without breaching the copyright laws and staying within fair use rules. In that scenario, you should attribute the source where it came from by citing the author’s name, website name with a link to the source. Make sure that it lies under the rules of fair use.

If you are not sure of the fair use, you are advised to contact the creator of the source for approval.

Legal Issues Regarding Trademark

Trademarks are the means to protect intellectual property in commerce issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Company name, brand names, product names, and logos are usually termed as a trademark of an organization that is not allowed to use in your blogs to mislead the blog users in the manner that it is affiliated with the trademark owner or represents the owner in any way.

The bottom line here is that you can not misuse the other company trademark so that you have the affiliation with the trademark owner, which could affect the commerce.

Always Disclose Paid Endorsement

If your blogs contain the paid content, either it is reviewed or promoted product, it is common ethics of professional blogging that you should reveal this information clearly to the visitors.

There are definite guidelines for the paid endorsement by Federal Trade Commission for protecting American consumers. We suggest you read FTC’s Endorsement Guidelines if your blog contains such content.

Here is some basics information that you must include in such blog posts.

Label the content if it is an advertisement.
Disclose the affiliates if the link drives visitors to the advertised products or services.
Disclose the truth of advertisement if you are working for the company on which you motivate your users in the article.

Misrepresentation

You are not allowed to publish false information on your blog about anyone or anything which negatively affects audiences’ perceptions.

Mostly in case of rivals among the same company or band products, intentionally and illogically you are not allowed to spread the false and misleading information among audiences either you drive many traffics or not, it signifies misrepresentation.

If you do so, your blog can be publicly banned under the regulation of misrepresentation of information.

Publish Privacy Policy

The source of information is enormously grooming the web users these days; privacy is the primary concern for most audiences. Either you are aware of it or not, these days, audiences visit your blog’s privacy policy before reading any blog post on your webpage.

You cannot capture confidential information about your audiences to your blog and share and sell that information to a third party without the permission of those persons.

If you collect the data from the audiences who visited your websites, you should disclose it.

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Disclosure

We are not an attorney, and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.