It’s a Ripoff: How to Handle Work that Infringes on Your Own
The web has made it easy for copyright infringers: it’s the work of just a few minutes to copy an image, an article or even an entire website design. That leads big companies to establish big legal departments devoted to chasing down copyright infringement. As a freelancer, however, your legal department may amount to an hour or so that you can devote to such problems each week — bringing in a lawyer is rarely worth the cost.
You don’t have to let someone get away with stealing your work, though. There are steps you can take that will help resolve such problems.
Notify the Infringing Website
Starting with a simple email explaining the situation can actually have good results: a surprising number of people have no idea of what copyright does and doesn’t allow for. If that’s the case, you’ll likely find that the person who used your work without permission will take it down if you simply explain that you hold the copyright. It’s not always pleasant to go through the process, especially when you run into someone with extensive misconceptions about copyright, but it is the easiest solution.
Take Down Notice
If someone infringes on your copyright but isn’t willing to take it down after a civil email, issuing a take down notice is typically the next step. While you’re options may vary depending on the country you live in, the most common law to issue a take down notice under is the DMCA (U.S. law). Such a notice must contain your name, the name of the copyrighted material that is being infringed upon, the URLs where the infringing work is posted, your contact information (not just email) and a specific request to remove the material as soon as possible. You can also send a similar notice to the host of the website.
Depending on where the website owner who infringing on your material is based, it is possible that he will essentially ignore even legal communications. While there are international laws in place governing copyright, there are many people that use the lengthy process of enforcing copyright across borders as a way to avoid taking down material that infringes on your copyright.
When to Call a Lawyer
It’s not impossible to find a new example of copyright infringement every day, which makes consulting a lawyer a very expensive process. Most of the steps available to you don’t need a lawyer’s help, though, which can allow you to avoid paying for things you can cover yourself. However, there are some issues that make it worth your while to bring in some legal help.
If you find that someone is making money off of your work and refuses to stop when you ask, then it makes sense to contact a lawyer. Because most court cases on copyright (at least from a freelancing point of view) are considered with the damage an infringer has done to your potential earnings, it is much easier to make a case when that infringer is actually earning money off of your work.
Some freelancers also find it practical to call in a lawyer when someone simply will not stop using their work. The nature of the internet can make it difficult to reduce how often this sort of problem happens, however. Ideally, every freelancer could easily afford to defend his or her copyright. In reality, though, it’s up to you to decide just how much money you’re willing to put into the problem.
The Problem with Copyright
At the end of the day, unfortunately, most freelancers just don’t have the resources to get every piece of infringing work taken down. It’s important to prioritize your efforts, or course, but it’s also important to realize that there are some battles that you just won’t be able to win. Moving forward is often the only option.
What??? An article on copyrights that does NOT mention registering your copyright to have full protection?? You are _really_ doing a disservice to your readers by glossing over this.
Do you know that if you catch someone red handed copying your work, and your work is not registered with the USPTO, you *CANNOT* sue for damages? No matter how good your lawyer is, it’s too late by then.
Read this, then please amend your post: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/
Mentioning registering your valuable works is essential in any talk about copyrights.
Great article and unfortunately an issue so many of us have had to deal with. I have found one of the most effective ways to deal with this is to contact the hosting company hosting the infringed work. You can usually deduce who the hosting company is by looking at the named server setting on the WHOIS info of the offending domain, run then through a Google search and you will have your answer.
Hosting companies take these types of complaints seriously and will usually investigate very quickly. In the last year I have addressed 3 copyright infringements this way and had the offending web site successfully suspended each time.
I list a number of useful tools to use in a recent blog post
http://www.indigoimage.com/blog/2009/09/has-your-website-content-been-stolen.html
and detail my approach in this post.
http://www.indigoimage.com/blog/2009/09/website-copyright-infringement-update.html
Each time I used this approach it was only when the initial email requests to the “thief” had been ignored. It is definitely worth exploring this avenue before resorting to a costly lawyer!
Instead of suing the infringer, I would threaten the plagiarist with exposure
and if he’s determined to be foolish, I’ll do as I threatened. I think that’s more effective than suing.
In most cases the first two steps will suffice. If the person is really unwilling to take it down you’ll probably have to go to the host. From experience, hiring lawyers generally won’t help or at very least won’t be worth the money.
I agree with poch. In today’s world where information travels at the speed of light and brands can be smeared with bad press gone viral, I think that could perhaps be more threatening than a lawsuit.
What makes it hard to catch them is that there are just so many websites out there, and sometimes you just don’t even realise that you’ve been ripped off.
One day, at a previous job, the boss brought in a new guy that did WordPress sites. At that point in time, I was the only person on board who was evangelising the potentials of WordPress as a business product, but lacked the design skills. This new guy came on board and seemed to fit the void.
We got to chatting about WordPress, and he said that he sold WordPress sites to his clients. When I asked about the design element, he just said that he wasn’t really a designer; he just modified existing template designs.
I raised the issue of copyright, and he went, “They can’t catch me if they don’t know.”
I thought that it was a pretty flippant attitude towards other designers’ copyright.
And looking at some of his websites, they do look unique enough not to be someone else’s code. But I thought that was still pretty unethical. Does anyone agree with me, or is he technically not infringing copyright?
Char, I suppose it’s unethical but I’m not sure it’s a copyright infringement if he is changing it to the point that it’s not recognizable anymore. Have you ever gone to a site that had an element you didn’t know how to code and just took the code and replaced it with your own image links, etc.? that’s what I did with my very first css navigation menu. It helped me to learn how to do it on my own.
I think there is a line you can cross that becomes infringement and then, by the same account, there is another line where it’s no longer infringement. If I take one of your photographs and I take it into photoshop and I work it over to the point that you wouldn’t even recognize it as your own, it’s hard to say I infringed on your copyright.
R henry: Yeah. that’s what I figured. I guess it was the flippant attitude that probably bugged me. Then again, I’ve never gone throught his portfolio properly, so if he did plagiarise anything, I wouldn’t know.
Wow, what perfect timing for this article!! Yesterday I dealt with someone stealing part of my site (read all the juicy details here: http://forum.freelanceswitch.com/topic.php?id=8711).
Copyright is very serious business. Us freelancers need to protect ourselves as much as possible. I am so thankful I took the 5 minutes I did in January to sign up for Myows (https://myows.com/) and uploaded my personal site so that it could be protected.
Myows helped me yesterday send a cease and desist letter, and within an hour I had my stuff removed, and within two hours had an apology from the person who did it. I guess you could say that I was fortunate enough not to have to use any other of Myows features if the cease and desist letter didn’t work. Without Myows I wasn’t sure what I would have done and what I should have done.
The steps in this post is exactly the steps you should take if your work gets ripped off. This is also the same steps that Myows tells you to take too.
Great article!
Awesome article. I’m glad you brought this important subject up.
Thursday, this is an excellent post. A friend of mine recently did a design job for a person who didn’t pay. Amazingly a random person comes to the same friend of mine for some coding work saying the design was already done. He showed him the preview and it was his own work. What goes around…
Great article. Thanks guys…
Great article and good discussion going here.
Copyright is a tricky issue, one that immencely fascinates me. Let’s keep this going!
Thanks for this great article!
Yesterday I noticed that my whole website was just ripped off a month ago. Fortunately the guy also copied my unique urchin-code so it wasn´t that hard to identify the ripoff…
Great advice for a person just getting starting. I am always careful not to download, copy or use other peoples work – but now I am concerned about my own.
“Stealing” someone’s hard work is just wrong! But unfortunately it happens and there’s not much we can do about it. Up to now I’ve been lucky and no one ripped of my writings (no one that I know of at least) but that doesn’t mean I’m not concerned about this issue.
Like Eric said copyright is indeed a tricky issue.
‘Take Down Notice’ – 2nd word in 2nd sentence should be ‘your’ not ‘you’re’
great article