By Carol Tice
Many people seem to think of the Internet as a wonderful, free playground where they can cut and paste information they find online and reuse it on their own Web site. But those people can find themselves the subject of a fat lawsuit, because copyright law still applies to written works published online.
You may be creating articles or blogs for your own Web site, and wondering how to protect them from being ripped off...or wondering how much you can borrow from other posts you find online. Here's a primer on how intellectual-property rights apply online, which I put together with help from attorney Nina Kaufman, better known as Ask The Business Lawyer.
1. Creation implies copyright...but protect it anyway. You automatically own the copyright to your work when you create it. If you have people create content for your site as a work-for-hire, you also own these works. It's all good -- until you get ripped off. Then, if you haven't registered your work, you will have a difficult time proving you own the copyright and compelling the offender to take down your plagiarized work.
To safeguard your ability to protect your copyright, register your work with the U.S. Copyright office. Print it out, put it in an envelope and mail it off, or file it online and save a few bucks -- it's just $35 filed digitally.
2. Put visitors on notice. When you publish online, put a copyright notice -- you know, (c) TiceWrites Inc. 2010, for instance. "This simply means you're putting people on notice you're taking your copyright more seriously than people who just throw stuff onto the Internet," she says.
3. Play fair when you excerpt others' work. Many bloggers love to tear chunks from other blogs and reprint them in their own blog. How much of this type of thing can you do without getting into copyright-infringement trouble? Only a little, Kaufman says.
"There's some leeway for 'fair use,'" Kaufman says. A couple of sentences and you'll probably be OK. Start reusing whole paragraphs or entire articles without permission or paying a fee, and you're likely in trouble.
4. Patrol the Internet for offenders. If you care about your copyright, you should Google key phrase from your blogs, or use Copyscape to see where your work has turned up. You'll have to discover where your copyright is being infringed before you can deal with the problem.
5. Ask nicely for removal. The first step if you find someone ripping off your work online is to call or email them, point out that they are using your material without permission, and kindly ask that they take it down. As someone with more than 1,000 articles floating around the Internet, I can tell you I've done this numerous times. In the vast majority of cases, this is all that's needed to resolve the problem.
Many bloggers simply don't know the law and don't realize they're doing anything wrong. They may even think it's awesome for you to have your work on another Internet site! If you like their site, invite them instead to post a few sentences and then link back to the version on your site. This can be win-win -- they still get to look smart for having spotted your brilliant post, and you protect your work and get a useful backlink to your site that helps build your traffic.
6. Use the ISP option. Internet service providers (ISPs) can be a useful resource if a copyright infringer won't listen to reason. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, if you inform an ISP one of their customers is infringing on your copyright and show proof of the infringement, they must serve notice on the offender, then take their site down if they don't remove the offending work. Since few netizens would like their site to vanish from the Internet, this often produces quick results.
7. Call in the lawyers. If you've still gotten nowhere and the copyright infringement persists, you may want a lawyer to send the offender an official cease-and-desist letter. From there, you're headed to court if you still don't get results. "But that gets expensive," Kaufman points out. "It's often not cost-effective."
8. Or...Decide not to care. There's a final option in the world of protecting your online content from copyright infringers -- don't. A number of prominent bloggers don't copyright their blogs and think of them as a free giveaway that helps build their brand. They prefer that these works be widely reproduced, everywhere and anywhere, because they provide free marketing for their brand.
Says Kaufman, "A good and benevolent universe and the karma gods may send good things back if you don't expend your energy trying to hunt all these offenders down."
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