Protecting Your Website Content

Lock up your website content!

We all try to take great care of our personal belongings, protecting these valuable items from the sticky fingers of little thieves. We close and lock our windows and doors, we remove our keys from the ignition and lock the car, we don’t leave our wallets, bags laptops and jewellery lying unattended in a public space… so why would we not offer the same protection to the content contained on a website? Leaving it unprotected and vulnerable is like an open invitation to would-be thieves to simply pop along and help themselves to anything they fancy. It’s a sad reality that we have to take such care of the things we rightfully own but it really is essential for anyone who owns a website to take steps to protect their intellectual property (IP) from copyright infringement, particularly if the website contains a great deal of content. According to the Alliance for Intellectual Property, IP crime has had a significant impact on 23% of SMEs in the UK, yet a survey conducted by the Intellectual Property Crime Group revealed that 40% of those surveyed had no appropriate measures in place to ensure the protection of their intellectual property. Make sure you’re not one of this 40%.

Intellectual Property

Anything unique you create is considered intellectual property and this includes your brand, your company logo, and any written work on your website. You can protect your brand or logo from unauthorised use by registering a trademark, and the content on your website is protected by copyright in the same way the law affords protection to original material in any other medium, such as books, movies, music and photographs. If you plan to copy or reproduce material from the Internet that does not belong to you, you must ensure you have permission to do so – if you do not, you are stealing someone else’s work. It is much like writing an essay or a newspaper article – if you include material produced by someone other than yourself, you must make this clear by acknowledging and citing the original source or asking for permission to copy or reproduce the work in any way, otherwise you are guilty of plagiarism and you may find yourself in a spot of bother.

Copyright Protection

The main legislation of copyright in the UK is the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. Copyright protection is automatically applied to anything original you create – you are not required to register to be eligible for this protection – but you must be able to prove you created it or made a significant contribution to its creation. Furthermore, it cannot simply be an idea; it must physically exist in some tangible medium. As well as original literary work on your website, copyright also protects the typographical arrangements of anything you publish.

Website content and images are open to a lot of abuse because they are so widely and easily accessible; therefore, prior to making any original work available to the public, you should protect it further by including the copyright symbol, the name of the copyright holder and the year the work was published, for example: “Copyright © Rapid Formations 2013”. Your work is still covered by copyright protection without taking these measures, but it does make it explicitly clear to anyone thinking about using your material that copyright does exist. If your website is content-heavy, you should include the copyright notices on each and every web page and piece of work. If your website has a blog, for example, each blog article will likely feature on a separate web page with its own URL – you should ensure that every individually deliverable item contains the copyright notices, rather than just featuring these notices on the home page of your website.

Registering your website

It is a good idea to register your website before it is goes live. Ideally, you would want your website to contain the full content that requires protection before it is registered but, of course, this is not always possible, particularly where you plan to publish new content on a regular basis. In cases such as this, your website would be built online and content-managed, so ideally you would like to have the ability to back up your content before it is published. To register this type of website, you would submit a backup when registering the website and this will ensure all new content is protected from the moment it is published.

You can register your website online or by post with a copyright registration provider. This service will also provide a facility that allows you to add new versions of your website, thus protecting new material that is published after registration and previously published work that no longer appears on the latest version of your website. This is very useful evidence if your content is ever involved in an infringement case because you will be able to prove your website was the original source of this material and, therefore, protected by copyright.

Detecting copyright infringement

You can keep tabs on your online content and detect copyright infringement of your work by using a professional plagiarism site, such as Copysentry. This service automatically monitors the Internet for plagiarism of your web content and alerts you as soon as anything is detected. Google Alerts is another useful tool for anyone that owns or produces online content or works as a freelance writer. It allows you to detect any copyright infringement and, better still, it’s free.

Additional website protection

Further ways to protect your website would be to include express statements on your website outlining the terms of use of your online material. This won’t stop those who are determined to copy your work – quite honestly, nothing is fool-proof – but it will deter some people who prefer an easier target, and it will be helpful for anyone viewing your work to know exactly what they can and can’t legally use, potentially saving a lot of hassle further down the line when you discover someone has been careless and copied your work without realising their error. Other useful methods include digital protection in the form of watermarking – this is something you may have noticed on photographs or images on the Internet, perhaps on anything published by Ghetty Images – password protection of your website, encrypting your work, and installing Flash software.

There’s so much you can and should do to protect your website and prevent all your hard work being stolen by someone else. It’s not an expensive undertaking, so it really is worth your while. If you need further information and professional advice about website and IP protection, you should visit the websites of the Intellectual Property Office, GOV.UK and the UK Copyright Service. In addition to IP protection, you also need to think about the basics of website security and malware – Get Safe Online is a good starting point and offers free expert advice for businesses and individuals.

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