A publisher is any person or entity that prepares and issues a musical, written, journal, or radio work for purposes of private or public consumption, for-sale or without charge.
- Legally, I am a publisher. What responsibilities come with that?
- How do I protect my work and allow others to use it at the same time?
- How much of another’s work can I borrow and call my own?
Consider these questions as you review the examples below. Try the quiz from the left menu: What Have You Learned? after you’ve spent some time with this section.
Web publishers are responsible for all of the content that goes up on their site. In the early days of the Internet, there were attempts to have service providers or domains responsible for content. Hypothetically, this would have meant that a search engine like Google or a provider like Shaw would have been held responsible for all libelous and pirated content on the Internet. Such responsibility would have resulted in the shutting down of the entire Internet in a barrage of libel and copyright law. In lieu of such legislation, responsibility has shifted from search engines and providers, to individual publishers, news agencies, bloggers, and websites for libel and copyright issues associated with their content.
Check out this Video produced by MIT about how to give credit to what you publish:
Video created by young filmakers at ICA’s Fast Forward program and posted to NML Channel on YouTube
If you post on-line through your own hosted site or social networking tool, you are a publisher.
What have you learned in this section? Take the quiz: 
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Is it fine to insert a portion of this on my website if I submit a reference to this site?
Hi, yes, we’d appreciate it if you referenced back to your sources.