Protecting Intellectual Property as a Professional Blogger

In this article, we will learn about protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) as professional bloggers. But before that, let's have a quick rundown of IPRs for people who don't have the faintest idea.

brown, classic, color, Protecting Intellectual Property

About Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual property rights are the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds. They usually give the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a certain period of time.

Definition credit: WTO

Patents

Patent is an exclusive right granted by the Government to the applicant for his disclosed invention of product or process which should be new, non-obvious, useful and patentable. Patent offers a technical solution to a technical problem.

Designs

Protecting any shape, configuration, pattern, color and the creations of the appearance of industrial products.

Trademarks

Trademark is a visual symbol in the form of word, name, logo, label  etc. as applied to an vendible article, with a view to indicate origin of manufacture or service or vendor in that respect and enable customers to distinguish the product of one manufacturer from the goods of the other.

Copyright

Copyright is a right given by the law to creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works and producers of cinematograph films and sound recordings.

It is a bundle of rights including rights of reproduction, communication to the public, adaptation and translation of the work.

The exclusive and assignable legal rights, given to the originator for a fixed number of years, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material.

Geographical Indications

GI of Goods are defined as that aspect of industrial property which refers to the GI referring to a country or to a place situated therein as being the country or place of origin of that product.

Typically, such a name conveys an assurance of quality and distinctiveness which is essentially attributable to the fact of its origin in that defined geographical locality, region or country.

Why should Intellectual Property Rights be protected?

IPRs are considered as a barometer of R&D activities, encourages technology transfer, national / foreign direct investments, and helps in technological / industrial development.

From the last many years it was observed that, filing of IP applications in the countries like India are not increasing at a higher rate despite significant contribution towards R&D by various Institutes, Scientist and R&D organizations, teachers, students etc.

Hence in order to implement National Intellectual Property policy, it has been decided by Government of India to upgrade the IP skills of professors, scientists, students/researchers, professionals, industry officials etc. through in-depth training.

Protecting Intellectual Property as a Professional Blogger: Why and How?

While many bloggers want to use blogging to tell people about their lives or to give them advice, there is another type that tries to get their work noticed.

Many young musicians, artists, and designers use blogs to promote their work and spread their name in the hope that they can get a following.

For those people, the things they share are hugely important to them, so if someone else decides to use them, it can cause a big legal battle.

Here are some tips on how to protect Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) as a professional blogger.

Branding

If your blog features a lot of images from photography or design, then there are ways that you can prevent others from using them.

One way is to create a brand logo and attach that to your images. You don’t want it to be in the middle so that it obscures your work, though you do want it to be easily seen and difficult to edit out.

If you do find that one of your images has been used, it can be easy to locate your original and see where an image may have been cropped.

Watermarking

In much the same way as branding, watermarking can be a useful tool for preventing copying of your images.

Many photo editing tools now offer a watermarking tool that will add faint images or words across the surface of your images.

They are faint enough that you can still clearly see the images, though they are obvious enough so that they cannot be used by anyone else.

The more elaborate the watermark you use, the better it will be for protecting your work.

Thumbnails/Placeholders

Thumbnails are a good way to show your work without anyone getting a good copy of the image. By adding smaller/low quality thumbnails of your designs, you prevent anyone from trying to download them.

Although they can copy them if you haven’t disabled right clicking, the image will be small and low quality, so of no use to them.

Disabling Right Click

If you visit websites, you will find that on the images, you have the option to click the mouse right and access a menu.

The menu then gives you the option to save a copy of the image to your computer. You will then be able to use that image without the site owner knowing.

One way around this is to add something to the code on your site to disable right-clicking. It can be hugely effective at stopping a casual person from just copying one of your images.

How to disable right-click? → https://stackoverflow.com/questions/737022/how-do-i-disable-right-click-on-my-web-page

If you suspect that someone has done this to your site, then the you can work with companies that offer digital forensics. They can then examine the suspect's computer to find evidence.

These simple and effective ways of protecting your work will mean that you can get recognition and reward for your hard work and talent. They can also offer some form of evidence if your images are taken without permission.