If you blog, post photos to Flickr, make web videos, or upload any other kind of self-made media to the web, you could be sued for copyright infringement – though maybe not in the way you would think.
You probably realize you can be sued for violating the terms of someone else’s intellectual property (for example, if you use a photo that you don’t have the rights to in your blog post), but what I found interesting about this post from The Blog Herald is that someone could sue you for infringement even though you are the original creator of the work.
The article linked above tells the story of a graphic designer who was billed by a stock art site for $18,000 and threatened with a copyright lawsuit for claiming to be the author of art that was posted to their site by a client. The troubling thing is that this graphic designer claims he was the creator of the artwork, and that someone must have stolen it from him and uploaded it to the site. But he had to be able to prove that he, and not the client of the stock art site, created the work first.
The article goes on to suggest some ways of protect yourself by being able to prove when you created your work. A “timestamp” such as the date underneath the title of this post is not always good enough, since these are often alterable. On blogs, an author can change the timestamp as a way of updating a post and making it appear on the front page. The same goes for sites like Flickr. In such cases, the timestamps don’t carry much weight.
Registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office is one option, but it is slow and expensive. The Blog Herald also mentions “non-repudiation services”. I had never heard of these, but as The Blog Herald explains:
The idea is is that, once you create a work, ideally even before you upload it to the Web, you upload it to one these services where it is fingerprinted, timestamped and stored in some capacity. Should someone else wish to dispute the claim, you would have a relatively impartial third party to verify when the work was created.
I don’t know if anyone reading this is particularly interested in protecting thier work, but I thought it was an interesting story, nonetheless.
Image by Bettina Tizzy via Flickr
Been listening to this one a lot, pretty much the whole way through.
This novel was published after the Chilean-Mexican author's death, and I'm not even sure if it was entirely finished or not. It is broken up into five parts which, while connected, stand pretty much on there own. I have not yet made it to the grim part about the murders of hundreds of women in Mexico, so I have so far found it enjoyable and even funny despite some dark underpinnings. It's had a ton of critical praise, and I like it much more than my last foray into the violent novel genre: Blood Meridian.
