5 replies to this topic

[adam777]

Hi

Is there any legal protection (or generally enforced practice) against people say copying the "wedding invitation" designs off my website, and then making and selling them through their own website?

Thanks for your advice.

Adam

[MrPhil]

You may be able to enforce copyright on your designs (or elements of them, such as scrollwork), but this is kind of a gray area (copyright versus design patent versus trademark) so you may want to consult with an IP attorney. Anyway, there's a couple of things you can do. You can post a prominent Design is copyright 2009 by _____ on the page, and if it's an image of your product, you can "watermark" it. Put something over the image that gives your business or site name or logo, but is not so big and ugly that it will lose you sales (or be so small that it's easily removed) -- just make the image uncopyable. If the problem is that your design is easily re-creatable with a similar font and clip-art, there may be no technical solution, only copyright actions.

[adam777]

MrPhil, on 07 November 2009, 04:17, said:

You may be able to enforce copyright on your designs (or elements of them, such as scrollwork), but this is kind of a gray area (copyright versus design patent versus trademark) so you may want to consult with an IP attorney. Anyway, there's a couple of things you can do. You can post a prominent Design is copyright 2009 by _____ on the page, and if it's an image of your product, you can "watermark" it. Put something over the image that gives your business or site name or logo, but is not so big and ugly that it will lose you sales (or be so small that it's easily removed) -- just make the image uncopyable. If the problem is that your design is easily re-creatable with a similar font and clip-art, there may be no technical solution, only copyright actions.

Thanks MrPhil for your advice, especially the "Design is copyright ..."

Yes it's the actual product designs that I am concerned with, and any design of a card/invitation is easy to copy. I will keep looking into it.

Cheers

Adam

Edited by adam777, 07 November 2009, 04:29.

[multimixer]

Technically there are different solutions available to protect your artwork

This is an article that gives a good overview

Assuming that it is somehow clear how to do a regular watermark for a picture, I found some articles about invisible watermarking, here and here and here

You can also consider presenting the images in a lower resolution, or in flash

Finally all the point is about how unique your artwork is. If it is easy to redo, even without to copy technically, then I don't think there is much to do, it would be like fighting about who was first, the chicken or the egg

[delta_blues]

Greetings,

A method used by artists to protect their artwork is as follows.

Rather than uploading a complete image, crop the image so that the edges are missing, (blank edges won’t work), The thieves will not have a complete image. Only the creator and original artist will.
This will prove ownership.

Regards, Robert

[MrPhil]

That could be considered a form of watermarking, where the idea is to "damage" the picture enough to ruin it for use by others, yet have it good enough to show the quality, and make a sale. It's a fine line -- whatever you do to make the picture incomplete, partly obscured/overlaid, or fuzzed/blurred in some way can't make it so bad that you turn off buyers, yet the picture can't be so good that someone could steal it and use it themselves. It's an art in itself. You can also consider showing images at greatly reduced scale, so that if someone takes the image and magnifies it to full scale, the image will be too pixelated or undetailed to be useful to them. Again: too small a full image can lose sales, but you can show some details at full scale.

Quote

This will prove ownership.

I'm not sure that a digital image with an edge sliced off would stand up in court. With a physical image/photo/document cut or torn, one can forensically show that the pieces do (or don't) match up. A cropped digital image? It's easy to duplicate the last row or column of pixels and come up with a whole new "cut off piece", thus proving that the thief is the real owner!