In this article, we’ll look at strategies and tools to get started with safeguarding your intellectual property from theft and misuse. Please chat with your IP attorney about your specific situation to make sure you’re well covered.
Copyright basics
In our previous post, Avoid Copyright Infringement Risk on your WordPress Website, we discussed how U.S. copyright law grants creators exclusive rights to their original work, including text, images, videos and other digital content. Just as you take steps to avoid infringing on others’ rights, you also want to discourage others from misusing your content — whether accidentally or deliberately. Copyrights to specific content may be owned by an individual creator or an organization. For the purposes of this article, we treat these types of ownership interchangeably.
In addition to preserving your creative efforts, protecting your copyright also gives you legal grounds to enforce your rights if necessary. It’s important to take action promptly if you discover infringement. The more time goes by, the harder it becomes to enforce your rights — particularly if you were aware of the infringement but didn’t take action earlier.
Here are some suggestions:
1. Add a copyright notice to your website footer
Include a notice in your website footer e.g. © [Year] [Your Website Name]. All Rights Reserved. Although there are WordPress plugins that will automatically update the year, it’s a simple bit of code your developer can insert in the footer that will populate the [Year] with the current year. We always try to avoid installing plugins if the solution is simple to code.
2. Watermark your images
If you’ve created original images — and especially if you sell them — watermarking discourages unauthorized use and clearly identifies your work as copyrighted. On a WordPress website, you can do this in a variety of ways:
- Apply watermarks to your images manually using Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Gimp or other image editing tools.
- Look for a plugin like Image Watermark to add watermarks to images in your WordPress Media Library individually or in bulk. Note: at the time of this writing, Image Watermark hasn’t been updated in awhile. You’ll want to make sure any plugin you use is current and well-maintained.
- If you’re already using a gallery plugin (e.g. Envira Gallery) to display your images, see if it offers a feature or add-on option to apply watermarks to all your images automatically.
- Some copyright protection plugins like WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click mentioned below also offer watermarking.
3. Disable copying of your text and images
You can disable users’ ability to select and copy your text or right-click on your images to download them. Even if you’re not selling images, scammers can scrape your images to use in fake ads, reviews or impersonation attempts.
WordPress plugins like WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click and Secure Copy Content Protection and Content Locking are worth a look for layers of features to make it harder for bad actors to steal your content.
4. Learn about the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and how you can use it to protect your content
The DMCA is a U.S. law enacted in 1998 to provide a framework to address copyright infringement in the digital age. It provides for a notice / takedown system, safe harbor provisions and measures against technologies that try to bypass copyright protections.
You can leverage services and plugins like DMCA.com to add a DMCA badge to your site, monitor the web for copies of your content and simplify the takedown request process if you find your content elsewhere.
5. Monitor for unauthorized use of your content
- Set up Google Alerts for unique names or phrases from your content.
- Spot-check image use with Google Image Search.
- Consider tools like Copysentry and Grammarly’s plagiarism checker to scan the web for copies of your work.
6. Reinforce with legal agreement pages
If a dispute arises, having a Terms of Use or a Copyright Policy page can strengthen your position. Make sure this page includes a clause stating all content on your site is copyrighted, as well as guidelines for proper use (e.g. citation) and clear consequences for misuse.
There are online tools with templates for developing legal pages, but we also suggest checking with your intellectual property attorney to make sure you’re well covered.
7. Take action against infringement
If you find someone is using your content, it’s important to act quickly. Failure to enforce your copyright immediately makes it harder to enforce later. Talk with your attorney to plan your response, which will likely start with a cease-and-desist letter and filing a DMCA takedown request with the infringer’s hosting provider.
Although your content can never be 100% protected, adopting a proactive, organized approach using appropriate tools can make it much easier to protect more of your work. We understand managing content on a WordPress website is a complex job. Check out our other recent posts for content managers and let us know what you think!
Happy creating!
Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash