The Internet has provided great freedom for people to communicate their business propositions, and even their products and services, to potential consumers worldwide. However, with this freedom also comes the great risk of possibly of having a photo that belongs to you, or the photo of a product that belongs to you, may end up as the photo furnished in someone else’s store or eBay bid. This warns us against the dangers of your intellectual property being stolen at any time.
As such, you must provide information on your products and services in confidence, but also caution your site users from misrepresenting your brand, your company, and your content.
The best way to do this is to make sure that your site users and visitors are aware of what they can or they cannot do. This can be done by offering a Terms of Service (TOS) section on your site, or a Terms of Use agreement before users can access content. While this may not necessarily stop anyone from doing anything, it’s a good stop-gap mechanism to encourage people to use your site properly.
It also helps to be vigilant. Look for your content—pages and phrases online—to ensure that no one else is using your content for their own use. A good way to go is to search on Google. A far excellent option is to go on Copyscape, enter your url, and the site will list about ten websites that contain a good amount of the text similar to those on your page. The premium service of Copyscape allows you to view a good number of pages that do use your text, while Copysentry alerts you when pages appear containing your work.
Moreover, keep track of where your business name appears. Google Alerts notifies you automatically when a term or an email address that you enter for search appears on other websites or forums.
Because images are hard to track, the approach to protecting your digital image content is to mark your images. There are digital watermarks available from service providers like Digimarc Corporation or Signum Technologies. These digital watermarks allow you to put visible or invisible copyright notices on any graphic, audio, video, or text files. With a visible digital watermark, counterfeiters who steal your intellectual property will find it much harder to use your digital content for whatever purpose they have.
For more established and popular brands, apply for a trademark to provide greater protection for the image, symbol, phrase, or word that you use primarily for business. Apply for a trademark online through the Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
For your text content, put a copyright symbol with your company name and the year the text content wad made to discourage people to use your work for their own. You can opt to protect your writing (with the right to sue people who steal it) by registering your work, this time with the Library of Congress’ U.S. Copyright Office.
However, to avoid the temptation of having people steal your audio-visual content or even static images, you can opt to use Flash instead. While it can make the site more difficult to access for some people, Flash makes it extremely difficult for people to copy your images.
To keep your digital-based products from being copied, you can opt to offer a trial copy for your customers, so that once they’ve tried it; they’d be encouraged to buy than just get a copy.

Tags: Copyrights, Intellectual Property, Trademark