It is hard to argue with the significant importance of protecting copyrights. Intellectual property is an essential part of legislative system all over the world. Obviously, there is some positive dynamics in protecting intellectual property during the past decade and we hope that this trend will remain in the future. Any kind of design products can be protected in many various ways and you may have heard about these methods that are widespread all over the world. Anyways, if you really care about your products and you dont want to become a victim of online thieves, you should take some actions to prevent it.
The very first step that you should take is registering your logo as a copyrighted material. This tip is useful for all types of online (and classical) types of businesses. Without a doubt this simple step will be a great cornerstone for your legal protection and it will warn everybody else that they cant copy or distribute your logo. If your company produces large amount of various design products it would be reasonable to use some tricky watermarks that would help to avoid stealing your design items from the website. Of course you can protect the external appearance of your design (website layout for example) and it will be protected with the copyright but if you want to protect some functional features of your website this solution wont be effective for you.
The hardest thing in the process of protecting intellectual property is finding the stolen products and measuring the sizes of the crime. For example your website templates were stolen and uploaded to one of the popular bit torrents where anyone can download them for free. The peer-to-peer technology would increase the number of stolen copies instantly and you wont even be able to find out who was the first to have uploaded your products. And it takes a lot time and resources to analyze and track the fraudulent activity by yourself. Without a doubt the perfect solution for this situation is a tool or service (similar to our design protection plans at Guardlex.com) that will help you to prevent, protect and in a timely manner warn you about all possible dangers that might occur.
If you are a web designer and you create designs for the third-party clients, it would be useful for you to dot the is and cross the ts before youll start working on the project. You have to be sure that youll keep the copyrights for the product until you receive the payment from the counterparty (it means that youll receive your money, otherwise the design product will remain your intellectual property).
Dont forget about licensing the materials that you are using while creating some designs because it is also a very important part of the job. It helps to avoid a lot of misunderstandings. Do not forget to include some notices that would remind simple users about the copyright stuff - it concerns images, HTML and CSS files as well as other files that might be downloaded or copied. Well, here we have included only some methods to protect your intellectual property but even by using a few of these youll feel the difference.
Author Resource:
Adam Sweetchuck is the assistant manager at Guardlex.com The company presents wide range of flexible protection plans to prevent unauthorized distribution of intellectual property. You can easily use this service for all kinds of online business. Guardlex offers a wide range of solutions starting with basic design protection used to create a website and ending up with the professional protection plan.