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Prevention
Cures Copyright
By
Grant Crowell
In
Why People Steal, we covered the motives and methods whereby
others steal from your Web site.
In this column,
we'll go over the most important steps to take for protecting
your Web site from these online thieves.
The first thing
to do is display your copyright notice on the bottom of your
home page — and preferably on all pages of your Web site.
This copyright
notice should be followed by the year of publication and your
company name, such as:
© 2001,
Grantastic Designs
We personally
use a footer.gif graphic file on all pages of our Web site for
contact information and copyright notice. This way we only have
to replace one graphic at the end of the year to update the
copyright dates.
We also put alt
text in this graphic that states the copyright so it can be seen
by our visitors who surf with images turned off in their
browsers.
Print out every
page of your Web site. Check your browser's Print Options menu
and be sure the Headers and Footers box is selected. This will
include the date and time right on your page printout.
Copy Your Web
Site
Save a copy of
your entire site to any backup media — CD, Zip disk, floppy,
etc. Don't make further edits to that copy so you can preserve
the original dates your files were made. This will provide you
with hard evidence that your content is "older" than
any alleged stolen content that might appear in the future.
If you have
older versions of your Web site, make sure you save the dates
and print them out as well. You need this to prove that you, not
the alleged thief, wrote the content and the code.
For extra
protection, take screen shots of the folders that contain all
your Web images, including their file information and dates of
creation.
There are
several ways you can protect your Web images, some offering more
protection than others.
Captioning
You don't need
to know any special coding or to purchase software for
captioning. All you do is put a small copyright notice next to
each of your images.
If you have a
number of images shown together as a single body of work, only
one copyright notice is needed.
This won't
physically stop thieves from stealing your images, but it will
give them clear notice who the images belong to and that they'll
have no excuses for taking them.
For better
protection, include the caption as part of the graphic or even
slightly overlapping the graphic.
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Continued...
Watermarking
Digital
watermarking lets you easily embed copyright information inside
your electronic (Web) images. This information, when opened, or
decoded, can reveal things such as the author/owner of the
copyright, the copyright date, the contact information, and the
terms of use.
Watermarks
cannot be removed or altered, and they do not degrade image
quality or add to file size.
Watermarking
works best with images that are larger than thumbnail size. Very
small images may fail to embed a watermark.
Numerous
watermarking software products
and services are available. Some are separate
software programs, others come as
plug-ins used with your digital imaging software, such as the
popular Adobe Photoshop(TM), and the rest are proprietary
software programs handled directly by digital imaging services.
One product
commonly used by digital professionals and beginners is
ImageBridge(TM), from Digimarc.
I highly recommend this and its software companion, MarcSpider,
which lets you track where your images are being used elsewhere
on the public Web.
Disable Image
Copying — or Don't
Some people
don't want visitors to copy or save the images on their sites.
If you're one of them, copy this script into the
HTML code of each of your Web pages and it will disable the
right click button on all the images on your site.
I don't
recommend disabling image copying for two reasons: It's
counterproductive and it's not foolproof.
It's
counterproductive because most people who visit your site do so
for legitimate purposes. If you don't allow potential clients or
customers to save an image on your Web site, you've made it much
harder for them to review your work and distribute it among
their associates.
Basically,
you're treating your visitors as if they're thieves, and they'll
be less likely to browse your site.
It's not
foolproof because hard-core thieves can find other ways of
stealing your site, such as taking screen shots of your pages
and cropping them to the images they want.
Register Your
Site
There are
several good reasons to register your Web site with the U.S.
Copyright Office. Not registering doesn't mean you will be
without protection, but you will end up spending much more time
pursuing a claim.
Not registering
puts the burden of proof on you, the author; registering puts
the burden of proof on an alleged thief.
Registering
also gives you the right to sue for infringement, statutory
damages and punitive damages.
To be eligible
for full protection under copyright law, you must register your
work with the U.S. Copyright Office within three months of the
date of first publication or before the date of infringement.
To register,
send a completed application
form (use form Circular 66 for Web sites, online
works and other electronic media), a filing fee of $30 (U.S.)
for each separately published Web site or body of work, and a
copy of the Web files (it's best to include a digital copy on
disk and a print copy of the Web files) you want to register to:
Register of
Copyrights
Copyright Office
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C. 20559
The views of our authors don' t necessarily
reflect the views and policies of this company or its
advertisers.
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