Copyright Your Website

A couple years ago, purely by chance, we came a cross a one-man web development shop who’s website listed a bunch of testimonials that looked suspiciously like our own. In fact, they were ours – copied directly from our site, word for word, without so much as rearranging the order or making up fake names. We were so amused and astounded, we laughed about it for a few minutes and then promptly forgot about it.

At Newfangled all of our sites ship with a default copyright notice at the bottom of the screen. Is this sufficient protection? Sitepoint just posted an interesting article examining the implications of copyrighting a website. Fortunately, according to Sitepoint the very act of producing and displaying content in essence implying that you hold a copyright on the intellectual property, as long as you can prove it. This has been the case since 1998

This seemed to my non-lawyer self to be all fine and good, until a case of copyright infringment actually comes up. How does one actually prove copyright infringement? And to what extent are we plagiarizing every day, when we reference or quote someone else’s original article or blog post?