Copyright & Duplicate Content by Tony Thornby (Living Streams) These topics have come up several times recently in networking meetings and are clearly the cause of some confusion and concern.

I’m not a lawyer, but it is my understanding that any web content is in principle subject to copyright protection automatically, i.e. without the need for any explicit statements on this. Of course, such protection is only significant if the content is not common knowledge. A grey area would be information which clearly had a specific source, even if they have made it freely available: Courtesy would demand that any publication of such information explicitly acknowledged its source.

The most dangerous area is copying of images and using them on your own website. There are several image suppliers who actively track unauthorised use of their images being used on websites and attempt to extract large fines (thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds) with the threat of legal action. In such circumstances, removing offending images from your website may not be sufficient to trigger withdrawal of the claim.

The ‘rumour’ that duplicate content on 2 or more websites will cause search ranking penalties is however not correct. Search engines will only endeavour to identify which was the original website and give it all of the credit for the content. The confusion on this probably stems from the fact that pages with virtually duplicate content within the same site may be penalised: The source of such penalties is attempts to secure high ranking for numerous similar phrases by having pages with almost duplicate content, e.g. for the same phrase but with a different county/town by just changing the location entries on the page.

For more useful articles on business use of the web, please make use of Living streams free, Google News approved, services at Living Streams' Newsroom or follow me at Coffeemate49 on Twitter

Please do post web queries you would like answering in this column to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it