How to avoid copyright infringement?

In the Internet era, copyright is frequently infringed. As a rule, for everything you can find, there are very high chances that it is protected by copyright because in the most legislations copyright exists without registration. Many rights owners include the symbol © to emphasize that thier work is protected by copyright and that all rights are reserved. However, copyright owners are not required to provide notice.

Even if a work is protected, you may use it in certain circumstances. Otherwise known as fair use this kind of use applies to noncommercial purposes such as criticism, commentary, or teaching, but the drawback is that fair use is a highly subjective concept to define.

Of course, copyright has some limits and in certain cases the protection doesn’t apply: for example, for facts and ideas.

Copyright infringement is imposed on a strict liability basis, which means that your state of mind in committing an infringement is completely irrelevant under the law for the purposes of determining whether or not you must pay damages.

With that in mind, there are some steps you can take in order to try avoiding content ownership issues:

1. Seek permission and give credit.
2. Use works from public domain. Material that is not protected by copyright is considered a public domain. You cannot commit copyright infringement using public domain works. These works include objects whose copyright has expired or does not constitute intellectual property, such as government publications, titles, jokes and ideas. Also, some websites offer works that don’t have copyright restrictions.
3. Review the Ownership Rights. Very often, the licensing terms can lead you exactly through the possibilities of what you can or can’t do with a certain material.
4. Purchase the copyrighted content.
5. Have an IP policy for your business. An intellectual property (IP) policy is a set of guidelines which provides team leaders and employees with the principles applicable in dealing with the IP that belongs to the business and to the third parties. Copyrights are also a valuable tool for businesses to protect their assets.

Don’t forget that appropriating someone else’s work without permission is illegal, whether in the form of words, music, images or video.

Intellectual property law is a constantly changing field, and even if the the law may be clear, its implementation may not be. If you have a complicated IP issue or simply have unanswered questions it may be best to contact us.