The risk of someone using your intellectual property without authorization is much greater on the Internet, than in conventional publishing. The advantages are of course that you can reach a much wider audience, at low cost, and whether it be literary works, images, sales material, a business presentation, you should use this medium, but use it with care and consider that someone out there is ready to download your text, steal your image or layout, and use it for their own profit.
Your rights are protected by law, of course. That part is clear. The problem with intellectual property, when it is only published electronically, may be to prove your copyright. We go beyond the subject of registration of trade marks, designs, literary works etc., Search for information on these subjects and how to deal with the particular problems of protecting your copyright on the Internet.
1. Make sure you include a copyright notice: the © or "Copyright", followed by the year and your name or business name at the bottom of your index page(s) and in hidden comment tags < !-- your copyright notice --> on top of the page. In the comment tags you can include the date the page was created. This insures that anyone who downloads your page in order to use it will know about the copyright immediately when they look at the source code.
For images, you would create an HTML page linked to the image; you can therefore include the same copyright notice, including the name and/or a description of the image and its URL in the comment tags.
2. Registering your index page with the main search engines serves more than the purpose of promoting your web site. In case of a dispute registration makes it easier to prove when you first published your intellectual property. And if you accidentally got too close to someone else's copyrighted material, they have the opportunity detect it, notify you and - in the best interest of both parties - you can rectify it before any harm is done.
3. If you become a BEO Member, you can notify us of the URL where your intellectual property can be found. We will register it in our membership directory with the submission date, and in case of a dispute we can upon request confirm the submission date in writing.
4. You can register your logo, trade mark and other intellectual property through a registration agent in your area. This is beyond the scope of the BEO website. Since BEO is global, we are sorry we cannot answer specific questions on this topic, as registration formalities will vary from one jurisdiction to another. Trade mark registration in multiple countries is rather costly and in most cases only feasible for larger companies.
5. Displaying the BEO logo on your web site with a link to Better Ethics Online may help to discourage anyone from stealing intellectual property from your site.
This is a graphical link for members and non-members:
<a href= http://come.to/better-ethics-online> <img src=http://207.227.209.113/beo/warn4.gif border=0 > </a >
Which looks like this:
Please refer to our graphical links page for a choice of colours to match your web site.
If you are a Member you will be entitled to a reciprocal link. We may at our discretion link to non-members, so please email us the URL where the BEO graphic link can be found.
Optional graphical link: (copy the HTML link above and replace: "warn4.gif" with: "warn1.gif")
