We are occasionally asked questions on the legality of publishing content on your Portfolio. This is an important consideration and can get you in trouble, so we have given our best advice below.
Please note this is not official legal advice and nothing stated here should be taken as a given.
From a legal stand point you are the 'publisher' of everything you post on your portfolio, in the same way you are the publisher if you use wordpress.com, Facebook or Twitter. This means you are legally responsible for having the correct copyright and permission to post things that you post.
Journo Portfolio as the 'Platform' takes no responsibility for what you post and will comply with any requests to remove copyrighted content where appropriate.
If you are the publisher
Anything you have written without being commissioned and have only every published on your own site or portfolio, such as a blog post is without doubt owned 100% by you and can therefore be published on your portfolio without question.
Works published by someone else online
If you wrote an article for another person or organisation and they are the publisher things are more complicated.
If you are only going to link to the article (i.e. adding it as a URL piece) then there is a large precedent for 'Fair use'. You are not publishing the article again, only linking to the original.
If you wish to publish the article directly on your portfolio as a blog or as a PDF we advise you to seek permission before-hand. Contact the published and explain that you wrote the piece for them, you'd like to publish it in your professional portfolio online but you will reference their publication. Normally they will say this isn't a problem.
Works published by someone else in print
Print is much trickier and you will almost certainly need to see permission to upload PDFs from a magazine article for example. This could be making content that they make revenue from available for free online which they're likely to more protective of.
Seek their permission - they may not mind or may be happy if you only include limited snippets.
Be careful with images
Always be wary of publishing images for which you do not own the copyright. If you are linking to an article online for which the original publisher made use of a licensed image that license will likely not extend to you using it on your portfolio.
Fair use comes in to play here again, but always respect other peoples copyrights, seek permission if in doubt and comply quickly with anyone who requests you remove content.
Still need help?