Gavel with Copyright Symbol on Chalkboard Background - 3D Rendering
To paraphrase country music songwriter Jerry Reed, be sure to guard your goldmine so you don’t get the shaft.
“If you have a website, blogs, newsletters, marketing materials, videos, audios, images, articles or book, you have a goldmine,” says copyright expert Barbara Ingrassia.
To attract high-paying clients requires you to create content. A book is the number one marketing tool and speaking is the number one marketing strategy. Websites should be filled with valuable content that proves to prospects that you are the expert to hire.
Ingrassia, who comes from an academic library background, has studied what she calls the “murkiness of copyright law” with the Center for Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland, the Special Libraries Association, Duke University and the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.
“We know that in the internet age, it’s so easy to search/copy/paste/and send in a matter of seconds,” says Ingrassia. “People do steal your content; they rob your goldmine.”
Ingrassia teaches it is important to plan how you can minimize that risk.
“Clarify in writing who will own the copyright to this new work,” says Ingrassia. “This could be its creator or an employer. Assume that any third-party content is copyrighted until you can determine otherwise. In addition to attribution, evaluate the need for permission/rights clearance, especially for any images you want to use.”
Ingrassia says to ask yourself two questions: do you have a license to use the third-party content in the manner you need? and, do you have a written copyright policy or guidelines for the use of third-party content?
In short: guard your content goldmine and don’t steal the gold from other people’s goldmine. It is frustrating when people steal your copyrighted content. And it can be costly when you, perhaps innocently, steal copyrighted material from others. Sometimes you might copy and paste a passage as research, and then forget to rewrite the content. The innocent mistake on your part may look like devious theft to others.
(In a past column I have covered the legal issue of fair use, which means when is it legal to discuss another’s work. “Copyright law does not include a 250-word fair use safe harbor,” says Joy Butler, attorney and author of The Permission Seeker’s Guide Through the Legal Jungle. “The origin of this copyright law myth is that publishers sometimes choose to give blanket permission allowing others to cite up to 250 words of a work. Authors should not assume that the publisher of the work to be quoted employs the 250-word practice.”)
To protect clients from running afoul of copyright law, Ingrassia offers the following nine positive tips:
- “Include a copyright notice on your work: © Year Name of Copyright Owner. All Rights Reserved.”
- “Consider registering the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office. The website is copyright.gov.”
- “Prepare the form now so it is ready to submit after the release of your work.”
- “Review your website’s terms and conditions, disclaimer and privacy policies to confirm that they are up to date to cover this work. This is contractual protection, not copyright.”
- “Immediately after you publish your work, submit the form to U.S. Copyright Office. There are definite advantages should you need to sue for copyright infringement of your work.”
- “Monitor use of your work: set up automatic alerts using unique key phrases, title of your work, name of copyright owner.”
- Schedule regular manual searches of social media.”
- “Establish a permission/licensing policy for requests to use your work.”
- “Plan a follow-up sequence should you discover copyright infringement incidents.”
As president of Manage Copyright, she teaches individuals and organizations how to navigate copyright law in the digital age, using it as a tool to achieve their goals. Ingrassia’s motto is: “Manage copyright; don’t let it manage you.”
