When you publish your work online, do you think about who can use your writing?
I’m not referring to copyright ownership, but to practical uses of your content that you may not be aware of or fully understand.
If you publish an article or essay on a public platform or social media site, can the platform use your writing in other ways? And what happens to your post if you delete it?
Content you publish on your own blog or website is generally protected by copyright. But it can be copied in part or in full, or scraped by AI crawlers.
Do you know who can use your writing?
The internet is a big, open public place where almost anything is available to copy, save, or download.
Writing is an obvious target for copying, but so are images, videos, or even web apps.
It’s true that what you write or create is broadly protected by copyright. However, the practicalities of the internet make it difficult, if not impossible, to enforce your rights.
The reality is that publishing online makes your writing publicly accessible. That means people may copy or use it in ways you might not agree with.
Over the years, many of my articles have been copied and republished. So much so that I don’t bother checking any longer.
Early on, I contacted sites that used my writing without permission, but my success rate was practically zero.
As for my ebooks, having them protected by DRM hasn’t stopped copying. Even some of my print books have been copied.
The new issue now is AI scraping, collecting, and copying almost everything on the web.
As with any new technology, the law often struggles to keep pace. Many questions about how AI systems collect and use online content remain contested or unresolved.
But all this doesn’t mean that you should ignore what you may not realize you agree to when you publish online.
Are publishing platforms more secure?
You might think that publishing on major platforms offers you a little more protection.
After all, these sites should have more security and blocking resources than your blog.
With the technology available now, it’s possible to block a lot of unwanted and unauthorized copying and scraping, as well as AI crawlers.
Major platforms may have more resources than an individual website owner to monitor misuse, manage access, and respond to copyright complaints. But that doesn’t necessarily mean your writing will have better protection from copying or reuse.
So is your writing better protected on these sites? And equally important is who can use your writing, and how?
According to Medium’s Terms of Service, you retain ownership of the content you publish. However, you also grant Medium a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, and display your work on its services.
Medium explains that this permission allows it to display your stories across its website and app, feature them in reading lists, and use excerpts or quotes in previews and other features.
In other words, you retain ownership, but you also grant Medium permission to use your writing, name, username, and likeness in various ways within its services, using distribution methods now known or developed in the future.
Regarding protection of your content, Medium states:
Medium provides a process for reporting copyright infringement, but it acknowledges that it cannot prevent people from copying text from its post pages. If someone republishes your work on another website without permission, you may need to pursue the matter yourself. Medium explains the options in its guidance on off-platform plagiarism.
I won’t fill this article with lengthy extracts from the terms and conditions of every major publishing platform.
However, if you haven’t read them for a site you’re using or thinking of using, you will likely find similar terms of use.
The key takeaway is that retaining ownership doesn’t mean you retain complete control over how a platform can use your writing. The license you grant and the conditions attached to it matter.
And when it comes to preventing other people from copying or reusing your work, you may have limited practical protection.
AI and your writing
Can your work be used to train AI models, summarized by AI systems, or reproduced in AI-generated responses?
The answer depends on the service, its terms, applicable rules, and how they access and use your content.
AI search is with us now. Major search engines such as Google and Bing increasingly include AI-generated answers in search results. These answers may include links to sources, but the visibility and prominence of those links can vary.
With well-known AI assistants and crawlers, there is some degree of protection. Services like Cloudflare offer the means to block, challenge, or dissuade AI crawlers.
But that’s only part of the problem. Every day I see new crawlers scraping content from my site. Very often they copy every page, asset, image, and code snippet.
Are they new AI crawlers? Possibly. Their activity doesn’t reveal their purpose, but publicly accessible web content is a valuable resource for developing AI models and tools.
Long gone are the days when copying website content was simply for publishing on a site to save writing original content.
The problem for me is that I can’t block or challenge all these new crawlers.
If I find one and block it, I’m playing whack-a-mole. It may already have collected what it wants, and another crawler can appear in my logs within hours, or even minutes.
If you have concerns about AI using your writing, it’s not just the big players you need to consider. The growing number of lesser-known crawlers can be much harder to identify and control.
Is your blog as safe as anywhere?
One small advantage of publishing on your own site is that your articles can include a publication date in the page code.
This can help search engines understand when you published your work, although it doesn’t guarantee that they will identify your version as the original or give it preference in search results.
I’ve occasionally seen this happen with my own articles, where a similar but edited version published on Medium has been selected instead of the version on my site.
The major advantage of running your own website, however, is that you retain control over your content and your site’s security settings.
That doesn’t mean you can control who uses your writing. But you can use security tools and services to restrict access, block unwanted traffic, and mitigate some of the risks.
What happens when you delete your writing?
As a side note to what I’ve outlined above, don’t assume that deleting your content means it’s gone for good.
If you delete an article or essay from a publishing platform or your own site, or remove an ebook from sale, copies may still exist in other places.
For an ebook, copies may remain on the devices of readers who downloaded or bought it.
Online articles may also survive in copies made by other websites, cached versions, or archives such as the Internet Archive.
Deleting your original content doesn’t necessarily remove these other copies.
Summary
Who can use your writing when you publish online?
The answer is almost anyone. But that’s no reason to withdraw and hide your writing in a locked cupboard.
Publishing content on the internet makes it publicly accessible, and that’s also its greatest advantage. You can reach a much larger readership than you might otherwise find.
You could try to pitch your article or essay to a magazine. But most magazines now publish online, so even if one accepts your submission, people can still copy it.
While I’ve covered a lot of ground in this article, the takeaway shouldn’t be negative.
Publishing online has so many positives.
Just be aware of what can happen to your work, understand what permissions you grant, and consider reading the terms of use of the platforms you publish on.
If you’re reading this, you prove to me that publishing my writing online is worthwhile.
And it’s because of you, and others like you, that I’ve kept writing and publishing for so many years.
Related Reading: Are You Publishing Writing AI Search Loves To Use?
English teacher, writer, and author. Passionate about grammar, creative writing, and self-publishing. Always exploring new tools and tech to help writers succeed.
