The recent comments and responses to one of my blog posts has provided me with the opportunity to take a look at quite a few Genealogy Blogs. Many of these have been lovingly crafted and it’s obvious an enormous amount of work has gone into them. However, many of them have also been hosted on Blogspot or as it is more commonly referred to Blogger.
That worries me! Although I have used blogspot for some activity I have always preferred to have control over my own content. I wonder how many of those who host their blogs at Blogspot have actually read the Terms and Conditions? In particular I wonder how many of these fervent bloggers have read this part of the Terms and Conditions:
“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services.”
Something to think about! All those words, those certificates, those pictures you have added you have a granted a royalty free licence to Blogger to use as they see fit?
I have always thought that Blogger was a useful place to discover if you enjoy blogging, to find out if it’s something you want to do over a period of time and a place to discover some of the technicalities of blogging. However, as a long term option I have always been very dubious about it – essentially for the reasons highlighted above – you don’t have complete control over your content!
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It cannot be repeated enough: YOU CANNOT CONTROL CONTENT ON THE PUBLIC INTERNET. And it endures forever, even after you take it down. At least Google is putting up front.
I am so glad you are posting this! So many people do not even read those agreements, they just click agree. Read them! Arthur Dirks is right – at least Google is putting it up front. But people need to make sure they read the entire agreement. For those of us who wish to have control over content, it is very inexpensive to register and host a domain name. It is not so hard to learn a CMS (Joomla, Drupal, whatever your choice), including a blog. And then it is yours. Once the rights belong to someone else, your intellectual property could end up on their site (or worse in a book or e-book), and there is nothing you can do about it.
These are your thoughts, your research, your work. You want to share them freely through your blog. But please do not sign over all the rights to your works, unless you are 100% positive you want to give them away forever.