My late cat Nixie, named for Nyx, Goddess of the Night.
Maven has been turned into a cat, So I am researching all things cat and ran across this “holiday” as a list of things that are the Special Day or the Month of Whatever. This was one of the sillier ones, and it gives me a smile as I think about how I can promote my own work.
January 2 is “Happy Mew Year For Cats Day — Felines, ever above mere humans in the great chain of being, have a day unto themselves to celebrate the “mewness” of a new time.” This is copyrighted by Thomas and Ruth Roy in hopes of promoting their Wellcat Holidays and Herbs. http://www.wellcat.com/january/happy_mew_year.htm OK, that takes care of fair use. Geez.
What’s really interesting is that they have no link to their herbs on this page, only an email where you too can participate in creating silly holidays for cats and a statement that they now take VISA and MasterCard. Get a clue folks, and help me find where you have something to sell, even though at the moment I am cat free.
Many writers are terrified that someone will steal their idea. While I did copy the words, I gave credit and linked back to the site. That is promotion. This post will be linked at several other places for my promotion, and in turn, theirs.
I don’t know if they understand the difference between fair use and online promotion, but we’ll see if they have enough sense to have a Google Alert to find back links to their site.
Every experience is a lesson if you get it. Maybe that in itself would be a fun exercise for a 30-day blog challenge.
I’m not too fussed about having my ideas nicked but I do admit to being far too worried that I may inadvertently infringe copyright. It’s not easy all this… 😀
Thanks for dropping by. I think you are safe.
If you make it look like you wrote the words without telling where you got it, then you are breaking copyright. If you show where you got it (like in 11th grade research paper) and you don’t quote more than 10%, you are probably okay.
Everything is copyrighted as soon as you hit save and put it into a retrievable form. That won’t keep people from stealing what you write, and there are people who “scrape” websites and steal the content, but Google is getting better and better at slapping them.
As for ideas, you can’t copyright anything that isn’t in a retrievable form: printed, handwritten, saved to a digital file, screen printed…whatever. Now someone might steal your concept, but they would never write the same thing with it that you did–if you and I had the same premise and the same characters and the same conflicts, we’d write different stories, because I am not you.
So, WRITE ON!