The ABCs of Securing your Online Intellectual Property
Learn more about the right steps to take to protect your intellectual property. This article was authored by Hodge Racter. Image courtesy of maxxyustas via Bigstockphoto.
Individuals will start showing interest to your ideas and contents once they found out about your success in blogging. You might even get up one morning to an alert from Google, telling you that your name was mentioned on another blog.
Amazing, isn’t it? Who would not love a free publicity? More than that, you’re very aware that inbound links will help you increase online visibility, enabling you to be found easily by possible clients.
However to your horror, you might just learn that someone uploaded an exact copy of your blog. Yes, word per word.
In such case, every writer’s heart breaks a little considering that they’ve invested a lot of energy to create a unique post.
Since we’re on the internet age now, it can be difficult to avoid your work getting plagiarized or reposted. Nonetheless, there are few things you can do when encountering problems regarding online intellectual property security.
Today, you’ll get introduced with some schemes to secure your intellectual property online. As you recognized these, you can diminish the odds of your contents being stolen.
Understand what Copyright Law is.
It’s up to you whether or not you want to get some help from a certain intellectual property law firm for your online contents. But in which way, know that your post is protected the minute you make it. It is your intellectual property and nobody can simply duplicate it. However, note also that the law just secures the statement of your idea and not the idea itself. And so, if somebody expounds on your post through their own words, that is absolutely fine. Indeed, you should welcome it; think of it as free publicity.
Distribute an Official Copyright take note.
This isn’t required with a specific end goal to secure your work; it also does not give you any extra rights. What it does is remind the world that a specific content is your intellectual property.
Make a Permission Policy.
Make a different page which explains precisely what individuals may do with your works. You can isolate your Permissions Policy into two areas:
a.)what people can manage without your authorization, and
b.)what they utilize with your consent
This doesn’t only shield individuals from reaching you about usage of your contents; it likewise gives you a stated standard to allude to when somebody disregards it.
Hear from them.
Not every person who reposts your contents do it purposely. To tell you, the vast majority basically don’t have a clue about the law and sometimes, they are not purposefully impinging on your rights. Normally, they simply adored your work and felt like they have to share it to others. The thing is they can be just unaware of the law; they only need some instructions.
Ask to take down your post.
Most probably, you want them to still look up to you as a writer; however, it’s understable that you don’t want your rights to be disregarded. In case you learned about people reposting your content, you can ask them to take down your post in a good way. After all, those people are most likely avid followers of your blog and you don’t want to lose them, do you?
What you can do is reach to them in any way possible, through email preferably. Begin by expressing gratitude towards them for posting it then clarify to them that what they did is unlawful. You can also lead them to your Permissions Policy page so they’ll know how it works the next time they want to share another ideas of you.
If the latter fails, demand now.
As you request for a take down, the guilty party can be cooperative or not. Favorably, they’ll apologize to you and take down the said post. However, if they don’t seem to cooperate, your next step is turn your previous request letter to a demand letter. Send them an email with detailed information about the situation. Note that you have already reached to them but they you got no response.
Reach to the violator’s hosting service.
If you can’t get the guilty party to participate, you have to complete a little research. Discover who is their hosting service and send an email. Normally, it is an address like abuse@[the name of the hosting service]. Disclose to them that you are asking for a take down of a particular webpage and clarify why. They’d likely examine things and if they agree to you, send their own particular request to the violator. If the infringers still don’t agree, facilitators will bring down the site.
Contract a lawyer to make a move.
If the hosting service isn’t responsive too, you may need to hire a lawyer to speak to you. You need to measure this against the damage you think is being done and the cost of suit. It can get costly quick, and there is no certification of accomplishment. Violators may disappear and return online even faster than you can work through the legitimate procedure.
