Re-blogging / Sharing – Several Ways to Do It

Standard Disclaimer:

I am not an attorney and any comments I post are not intended, nor should they be construed, as legal advice. If you need legal advice, please consult a legal expert who is familiar with the area of legal expertise you need.

For those who don’t know, there are several ways to re-blog or share another blogger’s post. There are slight differences between each one.

Starting with sharing – you simply post a link to the blog post. I rarely do this although there are a couple of bloggers I sometimes go this route. There’s one blogger I read and they made it clear on their blog they don’t like bloggers who have any form of advertising on their blog to re-blog even the short portion that shows up in a re-blog. What they don’t get is that U. S. copyright law allows this option. I make no money off the ads on my blog, but to this blogger, it doesn’t matter. Since the blogger has much deeper pockets than I do, I choose to not re-blog using the various re-blog options. However, at some point when my pockets get deep enough to hire a good copyright attorney, I may test the waters. However, most of what they blog is readily available from different sources – Some of the Places I Find Articles so I don’t visit their blog that often.  Also, I do regular searches using my least favorite search engine that often turn up the original source for the blogger’s posts.

If I really wanted to do something the above blogger couldn’t stop is to do a re-blog of their original post as a parody. Under U. S. copyright law, parody is an allowed exception to copyright. That’s why you have books like Bored of the Rings, The Wobbit, etc.

For re-blogging, there are a couple of different ways you can re-blog. If you are in the WordPress Reader, there is often a weird looking <  below a post that allows you re-blog it. In those cases, it looks like this re-blog – first way that showed up in my Reader: Using my Dreadnought — The Ancient Gaming Noob (Title)

via Using my Dreadnought — The Ancient Gaming Noob (direct link: https://tagn.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/using-my-dreadnought/)

Compare the above re-blog title to use the Re-blog button at the bottom of the original post: Using my Dreadnought (Title). No mention of The Ancient Gaming Noob in the title. Same thing often happens if I hit the weird-looking < re-blog symbol at the bottom of a post instead of doing it from the Reader. I also may not get the image that usually shows up if I re-blog directly from the Reader.

You could also copy/paste the first few sentences into your opening paragraph with a link to the blog.