Copyright Free vs. Copyrighted

Article Writing & Marketing Insights

Copyright Free vs. Copyrighted

Rate This Post: 1 Stars 2 Stars 3 Stars 4 Stars 5 Stars

Some folks (including some article bank competitors) are confused about the difference between “copyright free articles” vs. “copyrighted articles” vs. “licensed articles.”

Let me make it very clear:

100% of all articles on EzineArticles.com are COPYRIGHTED articles. We do not have ANY copyright free articles. zip. none. nadda. not here.

Every single article on our site is copyright owned by the author that wrote the article or the company that hired the author to write the article.

A “Copyright Free” article is a term that usually refers to the private labeled article crap crowd that allows you to put your name on the article as if you were the coward author of it. We call these articles “non-exclusive rights” articles and don’t accept them knowingly because we don’t want duplicate content on our site.

A “Licensed article” is one where the copyright is restricted to some defined reprint or usage rules and usually includes a financial payment for such use.

We prefer to say that the articles on our site are “Copyrighted” and owned by authors listed on each article. Reprint rights are clearly spelled out in our TOS for Publishers.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on October 24, 2005 at 11:58 am

Views 553 |

7 Comments »

Barbara writes:

So does this mean that if I write an article, I have to go through some legal process to get it copyrighted before I can submit to you?
Thanks,
Barbara

Comment provided October 24, 2005 at 3:12 pm

Chris Knight writes:

There are essentially two levels of Copyright, registered and un-registered.

You automatically get copyright protection if you don’t register your articles with the Copyright.gov office.

If you want legal battle ready copyrights, then go register each of your articles with the US Governments copyright.gov office.

Comment provided October 24, 2005 at 3:52 pm

andrew z writes:

I understand the guidelines as far as reprint the main being that I must use the whole article and credits. Where I am confused I do SEO professionaly and the duplicate content would still be an issue if sites copied a whole article or a part of it. To explain to the public Google will rank sites down for having non original or copied content. To quote ezine articles “We call these articles “non-exclusive rights” articles and don’t accept them knowingly because we don’t want duplicate content on our site.” So my question is this not still duplicate and if not seen as Duplicate then why not and how do you avoid this. For example if site owners want to check their sites for content stolen they can enter their url on copyscape.com. When I did this with ezinearticles.com it did show duplicate content. Thanks for your help creator of www.ezmuseum.com
andrew z

Comment provided October 25, 2005 at 1:37 pm

Chris Knight writes:

Andrew Z:

Prove that EzineArticles.com has duplicate content.

Fact is that we don’t.

We work very hard to ensure that we don’t allow duplicate content including massive database sweeps and article submission rulesets designed to prevent duplicate content from being accepted.

If we did have any articles in duplicate, point it out and it’ll be gone instantly as this is one of our prime internal directives - to not allow non-exclusive rights or duplicate content on our site.

Comment provided October 25, 2005 at 2:23 pm

andrew writes:

If other sites can reprint by following the rules will Google not still see this as duplicate content? So as to prove there is duplicate content I went to copyscape and typed in the url www.ezinearticles.com and it came up with 10 results. They give the first 10 for free there are often more.

If I write for you and I give permission for my article to be reprinted with full credit given then the content must appear on many sites, that is the purpose of allowing syndication, isn’t it?

Comment provided October 25, 2005 at 4:33 pm

Chris Knight writes:

Andrew,

You’re not seeing duplicate content when you do what you say you’re doing.

You are seeing spam sites that scraped some of our content.

For them, I hope they get their karmic rewards.

If you want to prove we have duplicate content, then you’ll need to show me two URL’s on our site that have the exact same article. You have no idea the lengths we go to in order to keep out duplicate content. It’s insane due to our database size.

Comment provided October 25, 2005 at 5:08 pm

t. mcdonald writes:

I think the issue at hand has to do with the fact that ezine publishers and other web site owners do take articles that originally (note this term, it’s important) appear on the ezinearticles.com site and put copies of these useful content articles on their sites. That’s why most people who contribute articles are doing it, they want wide distribution over the web of their content to generate website traffic as well as page rank (lots of links to the article author’s site).

The original site where the content appears benefits most from the content (in this case ezinearticles.com) because Google indexes the site daily. That means that Google will have a record of any article appearing on ezinearticles.com first, other copies will be seen as copies (on other sites).

At the same time, in my research, I’ve found that sometimes these “copied” articles will also garner/gain some page rank when found on other sites. At least one way around all of this for people who want to create original content for their web sites using articles from sites such as ezinearticles is to do a review of the article or to add new content at the beginning and end of the article. This could be a good solution for the SEO issue, while benefiting the authors of the articles.

Comment provided October 25, 2005 at 9:30 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.