If you are employing a ghost blogger for your blog, you should ask “do I own my content?” You may or you may not. This may be a hot topic for some clients and for some ghost bloggers, but it is important to know what ownership rights you really have.
Currently we do not retain rights on our blogging content when we do it for others, we consider it a work for hire, but that may change.
What are your doing with your ghost blogging content do you license it, sell it outright, or retain ownership?
Yup in fact it just changed and here’s why. We have had two situations where prospects either were going to write a book from our very inexpensively created content for blog posts or were going to migrate blog content into website content and wanted full indemnification and full use rights.
Now we license our content to you and retain ownership. This means you can not write a book from our $15 a post content. Good grief we need to be fair to our writers and this is really taking advantage of us and them. If you are going to write a book, hire us to help at a fair market value or negotiate royalties with us.
We also retain ownership so you can not migrate blog posts and pass them off as web content. The market for writing web content is way above $15 for 200 words in fact some sites are at $250 for this when you own the content. Plus we cannot indemnify a client against copyright infringement when we are making $15 a post. Although we never snatch content, to carry that risk in our litigious society is simply too high for the pay we receive.
As one of my bloggers said, blog posts by their very nature are derivative works. They are based on an article that someone else has written and researched. For high profile sites, they are simply asking to be a copyright infringement target by taking derivative works such as these (at $15 a post) and passing them off as unique content.