Intelligent Property and Copyright issues
Since I am not an attorney at law, but I happen to understand the fundamental and primary issue all about copyright and intelligent property issue.
It is very wise to "acknowledge" and "include" all copyright information, including Term of Use, Disclaimers and the like, on every page of your website. It is absolutely no excuse for people not to overlook or not knowing that your website is copyrighted and owned by you or appropriate ownership of content and the like.
Unfortunately, there are some "naughty" individuals out there somewhere on the Net misused your content or pass it off as this person owns this content by not acknowledging or obtained permission from you or orginial ownership.
Some of us already know about fundamentals of copyright information or such, when we were in college and the professors wanted us to submit writing assignment or research terms. You are required to acknowledge the information, publisher, year the book or source of information was published, what edition, and author(s). This is to give some authors some credits for the orginial information. Even if you "copy" some information or part of content from author's book, it is STILL belongs to that author no matter what.
Same concept applies to orginial owner of web pages as part of that website as a whole. If someone likes your content or image, then that person must contact orginial owner of content or images. They have to pay for it, some for free, but put that in writing as part of agreement, including some credit of information that someone wanted to "borrow" your information or content from your website.
Failure in doing so in proper way, someone could get into big trouble with copyright attorneys or very highly specialized lawyer dealing with intelligent property issues.
Some people think it is no big deal. No, it *IS* very serious issue big time.
Because of this situation that I had to copyright all of information on my website and/or with permissions of other original owners of whatever content using (TM) or (R) or (C). For some reason with certain portion of permission obtained from original owners, it must be disclosed no matter what.
It is time consuming and pain in the neck. But you do what you have to protect yourself.
As web designer myself, I have to deal with this issue often, because I have to find the proof of permissions of orginial contents (images or text information) from my clients, so that I don't want to be responsible should lawsuit aganist one of my clients and me or my freelancing web design studio. YOu need to document on everything from beginning to end of any projects.
In some cases, I have to turn down and refused to do the business with certain clients that I don't feel comfortable or don't want to deal with any "naughty" troublemaker clients and I do not want to have anything to do with that individual who wanted to do the business with me or my business.
I had a client in the past who refused to sign the contractual agreement form with me and begged me to do this project for this client. (I do NOT want to mention who, what, where and how..., though). The project was completed and finalized and I got paid for my service incurred.
Few months ago, I found out that this client did NOT obtained my "permission" or "grant" the permission to make some adjustment on artwork file. I wrote a pretty strong letter to this client along with that contractual agreement information that outlines the permission. Even if client "owns" (after pay for it) the finished project that I designed for this client. But the contractual agreement said that clients are responsible to contact designers should they want to make some changes or modify. And it kinda of destory the orginial designer's creditability and showcase of work or portfolio whatsoever.
But then I realized that this client happened to be deaf, and I figured that that person didn't realize the serious consequence and I made it clear to that person that is what and why I was trying to explain about contractual agreement form all about. This to protect myself, my business and even my clients, too.
(shakes my head) Oh well, I was relieved knowing that I am not only person dealing with this issue. I thought that it was just me or wondered if I did anything wrong or overdo with what I wrote that strong letter to that client. I told that client that I would NOT want to do any further business with that client ever again, because I could not trust that person again.
Oh well, life is a beach. Learning is a life. That is what life is all about, I guess.
I hope my experience and learning help others as well, and to prevent some potential problems along the way.
Cheers, ventiCM
Deaf258 said:
hehe! But you saw the other disclaimers, there has to be a longer more indepth one than what you pointed out. What about if someone got pissed at AllDeaf and sues Alex?
Come on back and share with us how you have or will resolve this issue.