Authorship and copyright in Web 2.0 activities

In the past, I never really gave much thought to copyright issues and web content, possibly because I’ve never shared anything on the web that I wanted to protect. Recently, though, I was somewhat shocked when a 264-page partial draft of a new novel was shared by an author on her website. She indicated that the in-progress manuscript had been leaked already, so she wanted to go ahead and share it officially with her fans who, out of respect for her as an author, had not already accessed the bootlegged pages. That act did get me thinking. Thinking if her actions would decrease sales of the book once it was published, thinking about the nature of content ownership, and thinking about what I should or shouldn’t put out on the web.

There’s a movie coming out soon, called “Julie and Julia,” which interweaves the stories of Julia Child, famous chef, and Julie Powell, who makes every recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of a year and blogs about it. At least I think I’ve got all that right. What interested me in particular was wondering if the real life author started with a blog before publishing her account as a memoir, and if so, how she protected her content from desperate screenwriters. Authoring a piece of work usually includes sharing it with an audience, but at the same time, original work must be protected from plagiarism and theft. I don't know all the ins and outs of copyrights on the web, but it bears further research. Given that one of my post-grad school goals is to write a novel, I’ll be keeping a closing watch on this evolving issue.