Protect Your Intellectual Property with Vigilance and Software Help

Melanie Gross
Jun 18, 2011
Updated • Jun 18, 2011
Internet
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Uploading your property onto the internet can be scary. Intellectual property can be just as, if not more, valuable than the cars we drive and homes we live in, yet we often treat it as if it’s nothing of value – as if we have no vested interest in protecting it. When we post photos to Facebook or poems to a blog, we often fail to understand the implications of our actions.

The truth is that in casually posting your intellectual property to the web, you may be throwing away the rights you once held over that property. While you may have taken a picture, if you agree to terms that surrender those rights, others may be free to manipulate and profit from that image in whatever way they see fit. You likeness could wind up on a website, a flyer, or even a billboard in New York City, all because you failed to understand the importance of intellectual property rights and the internet.

Protecting yourself requires different measures for different property and purposes. For example, most people have little interest in profiting off of the things they post on Facebook further down the road. As such, simply reading user agreements when signing up for web services and uploading content to them can ensure that your property is safe. There was a great deal of suspicion around Facebook’s user agreements a few years ago that caused many people to fear their intellectual property rights to things posted to the could disappear. Users responded, and the agreement was changed. This kind of consciousness is absolutely necessary to protect yourself from theft.

When you have something of value, however, things are more complicated. You have to decide how close you are going to hold your rights, file for protection, and prepare to fight for your intellectual property should an attempt be made to steal it. For most people this can seem like a pretty difficult set of tasks to tackle, but it doesn’t need to be.

First, decide how you want to protect your property, or if you even want to at all. You may choose to deliberately open something up to the public domain, providing it to those on the internet to use at their discretion. However, most people require at least some level of protection. For such people, “copylefting” or creative commons licenses may be best. These grant permission for your property to be used under certain circumstances, and with restrictions you set.

Finally, copyrighting may be necessary if your intellectual property has significant value and you want to upload it to the internet. Copyrighting requires you to submit documentation about your property to the government, which will validate that you have sole rights to the property and will then offer it protection. Most people have no idea how to submit this information. A quick visit to the U.S. government’s site here can provide most of the information you need to know. Of course, if you really feel you need help, paid programs like are available that can help you out. For most people, however, software is not necessary to understand the filing process.

Protecting yourself is no simple task. Yet with a little knowledge, a lot of thought, and maybe even a little help from software, you can protect your intellectual property from theft.

Martin's Addendum:

Webmasters may want to look specifically at the document Copyright Registration for Online Works. While it is not possible to copyright a domain name, it is possible to copyright contents on a website. Then again, you will have to pay a fee and, from what I can gather, copy all contents of your website that you want to copyright on CD, DVD or in paper form, which is not really practicable for large sites.

To many open questions for my taking: Can foreign nationals register copyrights in the US? How much are the fees, and how much is the deposit the document is referring to? Lastly, is there a way to copyright a website's contents without making it available on CD or DVD?

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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