James Cope

One of my earlier posts covered website copywriting, how to craft your pages to achieve objectives. As more and more websites aim to become a knowledge base or expert in their field, protecting a sites copy is becoming more and more crucial. This post covers the issues behind copyright & intellecutal property (IP) for websites, how to protect your online copy and the intellectual property that goes into a website. Looking at elements such as:

• Domain name
• Content
• Images
• Use of © & ®

This overview is meant as a guide to highlight the basic issues to be aware of, your local Business Link can help talk on an individual basis, or consult a legal professional. This post cannot be considered legal advice.

Domain name
Often overlooked but can cause problems in the future should a dispute arise over a domain name you’ve worked hard to build traffic around so check firstly that it is not an existing or refused trade mark. Consider registering your company name and domain name as a trade mark to protect yourself, some terms you cannot mark but the site below gives guidelines.

You can check for existing and refused, also register your own on the Intellectual Property Office website

If registration websites say the domain name is available check with IPO, do not infringe a trademark, ignorance is no defence.

There is more general information on the Business Link site on choosing a domain name.

Who owns what?

Design
When creating a website the method of its creation & hosting will have bearing on the intellectual property ownership. If you engage a developer and they create the site for you for example, unless otherwise agreed they will own the copyright of the layout and page structures. If you are the originator and provide the content that appears on the pages, then the copyright in that is owned by you.

This is vitally important; particularly if the web developer also hosts the site, in that if you want to move the site to another host and developer in the future there could be a problem due to the copyright separately owned as mentioned above. I would suggest you contract with the developer from the outset so that the copyright for the layout, pages and content are assigned to you.

If on the other hand you create the site yourself then the copyright resides exists with you.

Often websites are provided with a content management system (CRM), website developers often have their own bespoke system that they originally created. The intellectual property for that system resides with the developer, and it is unusual for this to be passed to you within a standard development contract. My tip here would be to look at an open source system such as joomla which can sometimes replace the functions of the developers own, and allow you to both develop and run the site. This should be stated in the contract.

Content
As standard copyright here will reside with the original author of the work, and if you have supplied the developer with the copy then it should be the case that you own the copyright.

If you engage a professional copywriter to do the work for you, then again make sure that there is a contract in place that will assign the copyright to you as the site owner.

If your developer is going to create the site wording, again make sure this is covered in the contract otherwise there could be a future issue.

A tip to protect content pages should carry the © Owner 2009, where the year is the first year of creation. Some prefer to include a ‘to date’ changing that each year. The approach is not a legal requirement or gives any more protection in law, but good practice and shows you are serious about copyright.

Images/Video

Again here it is back to who was the original author of the item, did your developer supply it or did you, copyright here will exist as an artistic work in photographs and images so check who owns what and if they are supplied as royalty free.

Always contract that images supplied are royalty free, as website owner you could be ultimately responsible should the image not be bought on that basis. The owner of the image could land a hefty bill on your doorstep.

Ongoing protection

So now you’ve covered the basics and you are the proud owner of copyright on some really valuable content, how do you ensure that it’s not used elsewhere? Well there are tools to help, websites such as copyscape enable you to regularly scan for sites that have duplicated your content.

If you find your content has been duplicated a simple, non threatening letter to the site owner usually does the trick. If not pass it on to your solicitors, do not threaten.

Once you’ve created the pages take a copy of them and check them into an online safe service. This digital service tracks the file attributes into account when you check them in for proof you have not changed them. Sites such as ideasafe provide this type of service.

If you want to keep up to date with IT & Internet Law then the site at outlaw makes good reading. www.outlaw.com and also www.acid.eu.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.