Copyright - ways to protect your content from being stolen
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This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post where I talked about how I discovered another retailer was pinching my content for his own gain without my consent. This is what happened next: I had a polite rant on the phone to him and I later checked to see if had modified everything. Well, he has changed the copy, but it still isn’t completely his own and he is still using my product image (albeit a smaller size).
I am willing to accept this as a compromise, but only because I made him feel like a jack ass on the phone. When we first spoke (before he knew what I was calling about) I got him to confirm that he was responsible for writing the copy on his site, then I told him about the copying issue. He denied that he had copied anything and that he had been selling item X for years to which I replied “Look, instead of getting lawyers involved I have paid you the courtesy of calling you to give you an opportunity to modify the copy which you have OBVIOUSLY taken from me. I’d appreciate it if you’d begin to extend a similar courtesy to me by NOT denying what you have done…’ I’m not one for power trips, but my heart was beating like crazy and I could sense that he felt like shamed 10 year old boy being scolded by a scary headmistress heh heh!
Hey! Get your thieving hands off my work!
How can we protect ourselves?
It’s a sad fact that the accessibility of the Internet and our desire to share and show our work makes it easy for unimaginative, lazy, (and lets face it) sleazy copycats to steal our work to pass it off as their own. I’m going to look at some ways that we can protect our work from copycats (or at least try to deter them) . I understand that copyright laws differ country to country so I can’t list hard and fast rules that apply to everyone and copyright is a whole minefield in itself, but I can suggest a few things that we can all do:
- Get yourself the appropriate Creative Commons License - the licence are free and you can obtain a ‘label’ for your licence to put on your site of blog. These licenses come in different flavours dependent on the level at which you are willing to share your work. For instance on my Handbag blog I have an Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license which means (amongst other things) I am happy to share any of my work and photos with anyone in the world as long as they credit me with them. You can see what my licence looks like on the bottom left-hand corner of my blog.
- Make your intentions clear on your site - If you don’t want others to use your copy or your photos say so on the pages of your site or blog. You could say something like “Please do not reproduce my images or written content without my consent, if you like something and you’d like to use it just ask me :)”
- Apply water marks to your photos - these things can actually be removed from determined and experienced copyists, but most copyist won’t know how (and they wouldn’t be bothered to learn) so they are a good deterrent. See below for Watermark tutorials.
- Do a search on the web to see if your work is being copied - Carla showed me a post on Startup Princess which had a cool link (in the comments) to Copy Scape. You can type in your page URL into the search box and the engine will look for any copies of your content on the web. You may be surprised at what you find.
- Search and destroy - OK so that’s a little over the top, but if you discover that your work has been copied and you’re unhappy with it don’t take it lying down. Contact the copycat and let them know that you know! If the copycat is a serial copyist this will often be enough to deter them from doing it (at least to you) again.
Further reading
- About UK Copyright
- About USA Copyright
- What is Intellectual Property - UK
- What is Intellectual Property - USA
- What is Intellectual Property - Europe
- What is Intellectual Property - Asia
- How You Can Fight Back Against Online Plagiarism
- Countries covered by Copyright
Creative Commons Licence
Watermark tutorials
I hope some of that helps. Have you had any experience of having your work being copied? 
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Lisa is a generally content (who said generally - don't get her started!) 30 something living in London, who amongst other things sells everything you might need to make unique and lovely handmade handbags at home from her online store 
Good on you! It’s great to hear that you stuck up for yourself - I’m not sure I’d be so brave!
It’s quite clear that you put a lot of effort and enthusiasm into your work and it should be you that reaps the benefit!
Suzi’s last blog post..New on the big list of sewing blogs
Thank you for this and the previous post on copyright! Though I’m very sorry that you had to deal with someone stealing your descriptions and images… :p Bravo to you for standing up to them!!!
I’m off to do a little research into a Creative Commons license for my blog…
Sorry you had to experience this, but it sounds like you dealt with it in a professional way. Thanks for the list of links, I have been on the lookout for something like this, I’ll be sure to check them all out.
Thanks for the mention! And glad the link was able to help. These posts, though they’re stemming from a bad situation, are really helpful to people like me who are still getting started. Thanks!
Carla’s last blog post..Down with a Bug
Well done, Lisa! Your words were to him were perfect…and very restrained (but that’s what gets results, no?!). What a beast though! x
Florence’s last blog post..Happy and sad…
Um, not to this extent. But people scrapping your content (usually via RSS) to post on their own computer-generated blogs with lots of ads on them is always happening. I was pretty amused when a blog about travelling took a post I wrote… cuz that post was about time travels. Yeah, good luck finding a plane ticket for that!
I normally use Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike-Non-Commercial License.
One good idea (when it comes to blogs) that I’ve read is to have links in your article to your website or other articles. That way search engines will have an easier time figuring out who’s the original and who is the copy cat.
Kelvin Kao’s last blog post..Chinese Shadow Puppets
Another really useful post! Thank you. I’m going to check out the commons licence information.
While I’m not aware of any copying of my work, I was recently in a discussion about Flickr. I have concerns about people using my images from there without my permission. What I have suggested to other photographers in the same situation is to only upload a small resolution version of the image, so it will at least deter anyone using an image for print.
Luckily I’ve had a few people contact me for use of my images both for personal work and for commercial, so have been able to negotiate terms with them.
I’ll definately try Copy Scape application to see what else is out there!
This post really has me thinking now…. thanks!
Melanie’s last blog post..I Found Heaven!
I was just doing research on adding a copyright to my blog when this post came along. Were you reading my mind?!
Tina’s last blog post..Project Runway Season 4, Epsisode 10
Fantastic Lisa! What a Jacko (Jack a– plus wacho)! The only good things about this is…You wrote a fabulous article. I have been learning so much from you. I have a ton of things to think before I spread pictures of my ideas around. Thanks to you.
Good luck with that “so called citzen”
Yes, my article about bead types, which I posted at my own craft website (http://magic-beads.ru/articles/1871/ - it is in Russian) was copy-pasted by owners of some other Russian craft site.
My friend told me about that. I don’t mind if someone re-posts my articles as long as they give me a credit by linking to my website. But those guys, ohh… I don’t like to watermark my photos, I think they look so much better without any letters! So I didn’t label my pics. Those guys took my article, and put THEIR logo on MY photographs!!
I was mad. I wrote them a letter asking to remove their watermarks from my photos, but they haven’t replied, and they haven’t removed their logo.
Now I try to think about it philosophically: if someone took my article and my photos, that means I wrote an excellent article, and made professional-looking photos. So I can do it better than those guys, that’s why they haven’t written their own article and took mine.. So, those guys suck and I am cool
Well, to tell you the truth it is not easy to usderstand for everyone. As a spanoch speacking person i need to read it twice before i said what i think. I will post back soon.