Web Pages to Include in Your Site - The Importance of Copyright
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The material on your web site probably carries a copyright. In fact, everything created is assumed to have some kind of copyright. There are standard rules, but the content on your site might or might not follow these rules. This is why you should have a special page that explains your site's copyright rules. It doesn't need to be prominently indicated in your navigation; in fact, sites often seem to put a link to this page discreetly across the bottom. But it should exist.
Maybe you're not convinced of the need for such a page, or you can't imagine why someone WOULD need such a page. The rules are all the same, right? Not exactly. Web sites for open source software projects often have explicitly different rules. Sites with user-generated content may or may not claim copyright on the content of their contributors.
And copyright itself is evolving. Some content creators are beginning to embrace the idea of Creative Commons, reserving some but not all of their rights under copyright. Some creators of web comics, for example, let others freely post and reproduce their comic strips – but not sell them.
Under these circumstances, it makes perfect sense for you to include a copyright notice. At the very least, you can point to it if and when someone scrapes content from your site and you're trying to get them to take it down. By the way, it makes sense to include trademark information on this page as well, and whether different pages on your site are governed by different copyright rules (and how to tell the difference).
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