The protection of intellectual, digital property is important for your website and for your customers and clients. Online abuses are many so be careful. I’m not an attorney. Make sure to check with a lawyer familiar with online, digital property rights just to make sure.[1] Bitlaw.com covers many topics also.[2] Online legal sites are not a substitute for professional legal advice.
Below are a few things to consider:
- Keep your website copyright date current on the footer of each page.
- Make sure to include a Terms of Service agreement on your website if you plan to sell online.
- Don’t copy and paste images or photos from other websites and then use them on your website. You must have either full written permission, or you must purchase the license rights to use online photos or images.
- In blog posts, always give credit to who credit is due.
- Be careful with Fair Use and Public Domain laws. On your website pages or blog posts, if you quote another source, do so in limited fashion and refer them to a link for the full text or article.
- Any PDF files you post on your website can and in many cases will end up on some website you’ve never heard of. You can’t control all your online content so know that your PDF files are low-hanging fruit for content thieves.
- If you’ve purchased your domain name through a legitimate source such as your hosting company, you own that domain name. If you ever get an email claiming that you have to pay someone $399 to fully protect your domain name because is used overseas, ignore the email. Delete it. It’s a scam.
- Again, always check with an intellectual and digital property rights attorney regarding your website issues. In the abundance of caution, when in doubt, get a professional legal opinion before putting anything online.
It’s a wild, wild digital world out there. Be wise. Be protected.
By Stuart Atkins
[1] Wikipedia has a good article covering the basics of copyright issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Guidelines_for_images_and_other_media_files
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