Copyright with Janet Jones (Creative Futures)
An interesting lecture I attended today was given by Janet Jones about Copyright. She explained in detail about the negative outcome it can have by using other peoples work, this even includes clipart, royalty free and generally free images. Content must always be your own unless it is used as a reference. If using other peoples work then it is always a good idea to give them credit.
I currently have a copyright notice on my own website so I am fully aware of its rule. This can be seen here at http://www.humanandcargo.co.uk/copyright
True Example of breaking Copyright Law:
I will not mention my clients name because of my confidentiality contract and data protection.
I recently designed and built my client a website for his business and on the last phase I requested the content for his pages etc. The content was added and the website was launched. I checked the content through Copyscape to see if any copyright laws had been broken and there were none, it was obvious my client had written his own content. Not long after I received an email from a company in london requesting that the website in question was using content stolen from their own and that if it was not taken down immediately a DMCA Take-Down Notice would be applied for. I contacted my client and asked if he had taken content from elsewhere, of which he replied “Oh I think I might of” I explained to him the situation and gave him the opportunity to correct this. This matter was shortly resolved with no prosecution.
The outcome : All of my websites are Content Management Systems which allows the client to add/update their own content in the future. Although in my Terms & Conditions of Contract I had already stipulated that using other peoples content is strictly prohibited, I now realised that a large percentage of us hardly, if ever, read the full terms and conditions when we purchase or sign up for something. So now I make sure that I tell my clients about copyright by word of mouth and then send them a follow up email to avoid this from ever happening again.
For more information on copyright see:
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