{"id":99,"date":"2011-07-29T13:10:20","date_gmt":"2011-07-29T13:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/?p=99"},"modified":"2011-07-29T14:20:35","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T14:20:35","slug":"is-crossword-blogging-illegal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/2011\/07\/29\/is-crossword-blogging-illegal\/","title":{"rendered":"Is crossword blogging illegal?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A short while back, a pseudonymous blogger started a blog covering the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crossynergy.com\">CrosSynergy crossword<\/a>.  It did the usual things a crossword blog did &#8212; it displayed the completed solution grid along with the clues and answers.  In fact, it looked conspicuously like <a href=\"http:\/\/latcrossword.blogspot.com\/2011\/07\/0724-sun_24.html\">the LAT crossword blog looks on Sundays.<\/a>  About a week ago, the blogger was contacted by CrosSynergy, claiming that the site violated their copyright.  They even went so far as to file a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act\">DMCA<\/a> complaint with Google.  The blogger immediately deleted the blog to avoid any further complications.<\/p>\n<p>Well, as you&#8217;ve probably guessed, the pseudonymous blogger in question was me.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t try to argue that what I was doing was legal.  I&#8217;m not a copyright lawyer, and copyright law is complicated.  I think it&#8217;s especially complicated for crosswords, because several things are certainly not copyrightable about a crossword &#8212; the empty grid itself, the individual clues &#8230; you could probably argue that the solution grid is copyrightable, and maybe the theme.  And of course, the empty grid and clues together. But again, I don&#8217;t know enough about the issue to argue either way.  I had just assumed it was okay because so many other sites were doing something similar.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t mind having taken down the blog.  It wasn&#8217;t getting many hits anyway.  But what really hurts is that as a result of this, Google has disabled my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/adsense\">AdSense<\/a> account, as they now view me as a copyright violator.  This includes removing all ads from my totally unrelated <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/boisvert42\">YouTube videos<\/a>.  I suppose I should be thankful that they didn&#8217;t delete my account entirely or bring criminal charges against me, but I don&#8217;t see it that way.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I guess this is a word of warning.  If you are planning on starting a crossword blog, you may want to check with the owners of the copyright of the crossword to make sure it&#8217;s okay.  Most of them seem all right with it, but if you run into someone who&#8217;s not, you can potentially get yourself into a lot of trouble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A short while back, a pseudonymous blogger started a blog covering the CrosSynergy crossword. It did the usual things a crossword blog did &#8212; it displayed the completed solution grid along with the clues and answers. In fact, it looked &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/2011\/07\/29\/is-crossword-blogging-illegal\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puzzles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}