It must be a tough deal to see your work being used by someone else for their commercial purpose. You must have put your heart and soul along with a lot of time and money for the creation of the quality content, and you, of course, would want to protect it from being stolen.
Stealing someone else’s work and publishing it as yours on the internet does have its own ramifications (in terms of poor ranking on the search result). But at the legal end, there should certainly be a moderator and for the purpose, we have Intellectual property rights.
Those creative works created by you, whether it is on your website, social media channels or on any online platform, your work needs to be protected from infringement. For all those articles, videos, blog posts, graphics, ebook, podcasts or
Intellectual property refers to the set of intangibles, originally created or owned by a person or an organization, that is legally protected from external use without prior consent from the owner.
Before the original creator markets or commercialize the idea or creatives, they should safeguard their work so that no other person/organization can steal or use it for their benefit. This is done by intellectual property rights.
The works that can be termed as Intellectual property are:
- Inventions
- literary and artistic works,
- Creatives
- Designs
- Logos
- Symbols
- Trademarks
- Names (of a product, company, etc)
- Images; or simply an idea
Types of Intellectual property rights
There are four types of intellectual property rights and they are:-
- Trade Secrets: A trade secret is any form of valuable or confidential information that may be considered as a commercial secret and may provide the enterprise with a competitive edge.
- Trademarks: A trademark is an identity with which your consumers can identify your product or services. It can be a name, symbol, design, phrase or a combination thereof. The right protects your brand and identity.
- Copyrights: Copyright is the legal protection of original work of authorship which is written down on a paper or can be accessed by an electronic device. Copyrightable works include books, articles, movie, photos, videos or any piece of creative work.
- Patents: A patent is a right for the protection of an invention granted to the inventor to stop someone else from making, using or selling the invention without prior consent from the inventor.
The Intellectual Property Rights for the Creative Industry
Those creative works created by you, whether it is on your website, social media channels or on any online platform, your work needs to be protected from infringement.
For all those articles, videos, blog posts, graphics, ebook, podcasts or simply any piece of information that is not publicly available and is an original work of you can be protected by copyright.
You must have various questions regarding copyright and its procedure. Here we have answered a few.
Do I need an official copyright registration?
When an author publishes a piece of intellectual property in its final form and hit the “publish” button, the material automatically receives protection under the copyright. You don’t need to register your platform for it and the protection is instantaneous.
The person who steals your work will stand guilty if you can prove that the work originally belongs to you. The law may, of course, have its own variations from country to country. In the US, the original creator of the content cannot sue for copyright infringement unless they have officially registered their work.
Do I need the copyright symbol ©?
There is a common misinterpretation that a website or the page consisting of the work you want to protect must have the copyright symbol or else the content can be copied.
This is outrightly wrong. Any work on your website, that originally belongs to you does not need to display the copyright symbol © or the standard statement “all rights reserved” for its protection.
How to get a copyright in India?
Speaking of an entire website, getting copyright done is a back-breaking task.
A website consists of multiple elements that can be considered as a creative work, such as articles, blog posts, images, infographics, videos so on and so forth. What Copyright office asserts is to file copyright registration for each of these constituents separately.
The digital space consists of people who steal others hard work. With this blog post, we tried to make you aware of such menace and which forms of redress are available at your disposal.
