Protect Your Intellectual Property in 6 Steps

Content is the lifeblood of information based business, particularly the legal profession. You get to show the world your expertise through content delivery. Content also gives your brand its voice and brings in your business income. It obviously deserves protection.

But given the realities of the internet’s ‘sharing economy’, how do you manage the protection of your intellectual property (IP)?

The realities of the internet:

All of today’s technology is not enough to stop a desperate person, or group of people from accessing some of our data. Once it goes online, protecting our IP is a difficult task. Our work is at risk of getting stolen, copied or accessed by people who haven’t paid for it. And that’s a fact.

Nevertheless, the merits of making your work available, accessible and shareable online far outweigh the demerits. Sharing of your content can actually be a good for customers acquisition, and may open you up to new markets.

So how do you limit the risk of theft, plagiarism, and piracy against your work online?

Below are 6 ways to protect the intellectual property of your content online:

1. Trademark your content
If you’re concerned about protecting your IP, then it may be worth you considering getting a Trademark. It’s not quite expensive, more so it helps your argument in court, should anyone dare ‘cross your line’.

2. Print & mail your content to yourself
Print out your whole content and any corresponding or supporting documents, then mail it (by courier, not email) to yourself as a tracked and recorded delivery, then never ever open it. If your content gets reproduced, you will be able to present your case appropriately in court with the dated evidence of when your content was created and how long it has been around for.

3. Watermark your content
Imputing your brand name and/or website URL as watermark over your content makes it much difficult to replicate. Even if the content is stolen, it will likely always carry your name along with it.

4. Put a unique spin to it
This is a strategy that isn’t cast in stone, but it can be very helpful to have something unique that people can always recognize and ascribe to your content. Every good designer out there has a unique set of figures they infuse in their work to make it uniquely theirs. It could be the font style, use of color, use of shapes, etc. For video content, it could be a theme song, the sound or pitch of the voice over, the use of slang or punchlines, etc.

5. Keep an eye out for duplicates of your content
Google Alerts is a good monitoring tool for content online, and it’s completely free. You can instruct the tool to alert you when your brand name or content is mentioned or attributed online. And the tool will send you an email every time that happens.

6. Have a Copyright Policy on your blog or website
Creating your own policies on your website/blog will help guide and educate persons who visit or use your property about the use of your IP. Although this will not necessarily protect you legally, it will guide who wish to reference you fairly on how to do it in the right way. Here’s a simple guide to developing a copyright policy.

Finally, consider imputing a copyright © symbol or disclaimer on your content. It won’t offer any protection per se, but it can make people think twice before they reproduce it.