My big red Webster's defines a copyright as "the exclusive ownership of and the right to make sure of a literary, musical, or artistic work, protected by the law for a specified period of time." This is the definition applied to movies, songs, lyrics, books, paintings, etc. However, an internet copyright is entirely different.
'Net copyrights don't have anything to do with the law, unless you're a major corporation. Real copyrights cost major bucks, so ordinary web builders like myself can't get their images and text copyrighted for real. However, we don't just want people to right-click and save to disk something that we took hours to create. The easiest way to say "don't steal my stuff" is to put a short copyright message or image on the bottom of your pages. Mine is as follows:
©1999-2000 by Erika K. Riggio. Anything here has either been created by me or stolen from corporate bigwigs. It's time they started giving back to the people! :o) Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) is a trademark of Best Brains Incorporated (BBI). The song lyrics featured at Shadowvoxer are copyrighted to whatever they happen to be copyrighted to. Hell, I don't know, I just know that they're copyrighted, okay? Petz is a registered trademark of PF.Magic. The posters on the reviews site are collected from various places around the web- sorry for stealing, guys. *g* Special thanks to Stephanie Fleet for getting me my Photoshop software; and Courtney Enlow, Brianjedi, Theresa a.k.a. Cheese Goddess, and TerranSky, my MST3K writing staff. You guys all rock!I've also started putting a copyright image on the bottom of each page, which looks like this:
However, so long as people can right-click, they can steal images, and so long as people can highlight text, they can steal it, too. There isn't a code for anti-highlighting, but there is a no-right-click code. I don't use it, however. Why not? Because no-right-click codes piss me off. I don't generally steal images, but if a page has a particularly cool font color or a nice style, I like to view source on it so I can borrow the idea. But if I can't right-click, I can't view source, and that bothers me. I want anyone who visits the AWOS to be able to see how I put my pages together, especially since I don't use a page generator like Frontpage and write the code myself. But people do what they want to do... if you're interested, the no-right-click code is avaliable here. Another option is to put a copyright message on the bottom of your images, like Cybriar.com does. I don't do this, however, because it would take far too long to put a copyright on each of my images. Besides, one most likely wouldn't fit on the banners and would look out of place on the logos.
Personally, I don't want to spend hours building this site, making images, testing colors, cropping pics and all that, just to have someone steal them and use them on their site. It's not fair to me, and it's really not fair to the person who stole them, considering that s/he has been removed from the fun process of creating their own stuff. I find creating images to be a blast, and I personally can't understand why people wouldn't want to spend time making their own stuff to be proud of. However, I'm not going to go to such drastic measures as to put up a no-right-click code or anything. I'm willing to trust anyone who visits my site enough to just give out the copyright as a warning.
If you see any of my images floating around on the net, do mail me. For more information on this subject, visit-
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