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Are Your Assets Being Stolen?

by Shelly Bowen

When the economy is down, everyone is looking for a way to cut costs. Unfortunately, that may mean that your intellectual and creative assets may be even more at risk that usual: specifically, the art, photography, and content you’ve purchased or created in-house might be stolen right from under your nose.

How to Protect Your Online Creative Content — and Your Brand

1. On every online page of your content, include a byline, a copyright notice, and clear directions on how to get permission to use the content. Example:

Copyright (c) 2008 Shelly Bowen. All rights reserved. No portions of this site may be reproduced without explicit permission from the author or artist. For permission, please contact us.

2. For photos and original graphics:

  • Ask your art department to include meta data with every image file. It should include the copyright, or your rights to reproduce the content, the date, and the original creator. Name the file with keywords for SEO and your brand name.
  • Use watermarks to reduce risk. Watermark can be a copyright or brand name.
  • Use Flash technology where appropriate to reduce risk of copying images.

3. Use Google Alerts to notify you of anyone publishing something with your name or brand name in it.

4. Periodically, do an online search for your own images and content. If someone is using your content without permission, send them a polite email to let them know it’s yours and request they:

  • Remove the content immediately or
  • Give you credit and a link to your site or
  • Shorten the length of the quote and link to you (quoting a small portion of an article and giving credit is OK without permission)
  • Pay a fee and sign a license agreement

Note that most large companies will not allow anyone to use their logos without permission and a usage fee. Even if you’re a re-seller.

Unknowing Thieves

Most of the time, the people doing the pilfering truly don’t know they’re breaking any copyright or intellectual property laws or licensing agreements. It’s easy enough to do a Google image search and copy a photo, graphic, or logo for another Web site, blog, e-mail, or banner ad. Or copy an article or large portions of an article.

Providing Credit to the Source Isn’t Enough Sometimes, the content copiers will be kind enough to provide credit to the original source, believing that makes it all right. But what they don’t realize is that the original company — let’s say an independent real estate agent or hair salon or boutique retail shop — paid for the rights to that content. So why should someone else get to leverage it for free?

Protect Yourself

Finally, be sure to talk to your own creative and content departments about copyright laws and plagiarism. Pass along this article, so you know they know what’s ok to use and what’s not. Basically, if it doesn’t SAY it’s free to copy, it’s not. And do a spot check — be sure you know where your online creative is coming from.

Leverage the free copyright and licensing tools at Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that helps artists, writers, scientists, and educators protect their work. Also check out My Free Copyright. And keep an eye out for rising technology that will allow you to track your creative — even if it’s been modified — all over the Internet. There’s already one in alpha (not quite there yet) for articles called Copyright Spot.

Copyright (c) 2008 Shelly Bowen. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shelly Bowen on Dec 17, 2008. Filed under Branding, Content Marketing, SEO Content

 

1 Comment | RSS feed for comments on this post

  • GREAT post! I know you and I have spoken about this before but I’m happy to see you lay it out so well here. I truly believe that most “offenders” do not know that they are stealing content. The Web is still a little bit Wild West but things are changing and artists are becoming more savvy with a lot of tools and help from organizations like the PLUS Coalition and Creative Commons.

    Thanks!
    http://garyallard.com

    Comment by Gary Allard on Dec 18, 2008

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