Newspapers Using Blogs Without Permission?

Generally you might think that bloggers often take copyrighted material and reproduce them without permission online. But a UK blogger found that the Sunday Mail reproduced one of his entries without even asking for permission. The author sent a letter to the paper:

Not having worked for the Mail on Sunday before, and a stated wordage figure proving elusive, I pluck a conservative amount out of the air and stick it on the bottom of an invoice, which goes off via the kind auspices of the G.P.O. To the Mail on Sunday’s credit, they pay me my two hundred quid quicker than most biggish companies would, and John Wellington sends me his (what I am sure are sincere) apologies.

Good for him - but one graph of the reply from the paper (outside of the check) was disturbing:

We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.

There is apparently some history of this happening in the UK, once again the Mail on Sunday. And in some cases, it appears that bloggers are finding writing or even graphics used by papers without permission but then thinking they were fortunate. This commentary in the Guardian Unlimited (online presence of the Guardian in the UK) is correct in stating that online work also is intellectual property.

But in the United States, that doesn't help you a bit unless you have registered your copyright. Registering after infringement lets you take legal action, but you can only go after the actual profits made off your work, and you cannot ask for legal fee reimbursement. No, the only practical way to go is to register either before the infringement, or within three months of the first publication (which, in the case of blogs, means when it first appears online). If you are not registering the copyright of your new blog entries every three months, you are running the risk of someone using them and being unable to do much of anything about it.