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Copyright Tips Protect Your Site  In other publications, I have written on Internet copyright law, and the tangled web it weaves, especially in the area of intellectual property in electronic form, such as web pages. The response from these few articles has been immense, and that response, coupled with new situations arising with copyright on the web, have prompted me to write again on the subject. Recently, more and more large media corporations, such as Sony and Disney, have begun to crack down on web sites featuring material from bands, movies, TV, magazines, and more. Last year, a well-publicized case involving Sony and it's web designers, large corporations, who threatened to sue all Oasis sites featuring pictures of the band, song clips, and other material that had any chance of being copyrighted. The webmasters eventually came out on top, but not before over 50 sites closed from the pressure. Other companies have followed suit, and many, like Playboy, have won in court after proving that material had been taken from their pages without permission. Still others, like Comedy Central, which produces the South Park TV show, have allowed fan sites to roam free, even those offering entire episodes on demand for free. Unable to produce shows fast enough for their growing audience, they have decided to let fan sites bridge the gap, and look likely to continue supporting them.However, not all companies have the same outlook. Many continue to persecute fan sites in order to increase hits at their "official" pages. Still, the unofficial sites thrive, and if you are one of them, there are some simple steps you can take to put yourself on sturdier legal ground. None of the techniques described here are guaranteed to work, and the truth is, they can't keep large corporations from suing you in most cases. But they do make it harder, and most publishers don't have the time or patience to put up a hard fight, The first pages they go after will be the weak, easy wins in court so that the other sites will be scared into submission. These tips can turn your site from a weakling to a stronghold.
First things first - Put something to the effect of "Copyright 1998 Your Name" on at least your main page. For a special touch, add "all original material" before the copyright statement. Make sure you show that the original material on your page is fully yours. Then you can say... The "Used for review purposes only" is the biggie. That allows
you to use the big copyright loophole - "fair use" - the right
to use copyrighted content in a review without permission. Rolling Stone
doesn't have to ask Sony, Columbia, or other music publishers for permission to print album covers or to quote lyrics. They simply have to prove that their
use of the copyrighted material did not exceed "fair use." More on this later. Where lare companies are going to hit you hardest is with copyrighted pictures on your server. The big wins in internet copyright suits have all been against ISPs for allowing the material to reside on their servers. If you
have graphics from other sources, simply point your img src tags to those
remote servers and delete the copies from yours.This may seem like a lot
of work, but it's the best way to protect yourself - they can't sue you
if the material isn't on your server. Also, see if you can find alternatives
to material you scanned in. You don't need to scan in an album cover -
simply use the one at your favorite online music store. If thre is only one major source threatening you, don't be scared into trashing your other material. If you take a concert picture found in Spin, taken by their photographers, and scan it onto your page, no one else can do a thing about it. Rolling Stone can, but the band's owners don't own the rights to that piture and never will. Lyrics, music, tab, and pictures coming from liner notes or direct from the publishers or bands can be viewed as copyright infringement, though. That's what you have to delete. Right now, the biggest power in your hand is that of fair use. The 1978 copyright revision spells out the fair use of copyrighted material. It says that some material used by reporters, critics, scholars, or teachers for noncommercial purposes is exempt from copyright restrictions. The key test of copyright infringement is whether someone other than the copyright holder uses the reproduced documents for profitable gain and whether such reproductions reduce the demand for the original copyrighted work. If you can prove that you didn't reproduce the material (put it on your server) and didn't gain profit or reduce the original owner's profit, you could win. |
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