036: What Bloggers Need to Know about Copyrights, Trademarks & Contracts with Becky from My Utensil Crock
Welcome to episode 36 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! Today, Bjork is talking with Becky Brown, a lawyer by day and food blogger by night, about copyrights, trademarks, and other legal stuff that surrounds blogging.
Becky Brown is an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, and she has been for a rather long time. She started her food blog as a way to document what she did in her free time - namely, cooking!
However, as she got more and more involved with her blog she realized that there were legal implications for some of the things she did online. She also realized that there wasn't a good resource for bloggers that explained these legalities and and helped people navigate through them.
So, she and Liz Vaysman got together and put together an ebook specifically for bloggers that describes everything you need to know about the legalese of blogging in plain, easy-to-understand English. The ebook is called Think Like a Lawyer, Blog Like a Pro and helps bloggers avoid legal pitfalls that can otherwise catch you totally off guard.
As a special bonus, Becky is offering her book, Think Like a Lawyer Blog Like a Pro at a special discount for Food Blogger Pro members! To get the discount, head on over to our Deals page. If you're not an FBP member, you can still get the ebook on Becky's website here!
In this great episode, Becky talks about:- How her "linear interest in her hobby" led her to start a food blog
- What types of intellectual property bloggers have right to
- How she partnered with another legal expert to write the ebook
- How to write your Copyright notice for your blog
- The difference between a copyright and a trademark
- Whether or not recipes are copyright
- How Buzzfeed and HuffPost get away with sharing so much of other peoples' content
- Whether or not you should legally protect your content
Get the show notes at foodbloggerpro.com/36
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com.
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