Now that you can make a live website, it is important to take a moment and observe the etiquette, rules and laws of working with web content. People often make the wrong assumption that they can just copy and paste text from another person’s website, as long as they credit the original author. Or they do an image search and just save what they find to use on their own page.
An abundance of created works in present day are in digital format, and anybody can get a hold of work presented on the web. To ensure people can rightfully claim their own work, inherent protections have been established.
Anything a person makes that requires thought and creativity is his or her intellectual property. Once people put their ideas and inventions into a tangible form (and this does include digital format), it belongs to them. Certain things that aren’t unique to an individual, like facts, cannot be claimed as intellectual property. However, if a person writes an essay on a fact, nobody else can use it without permission, because it contains original, created work.
Adapting to the digital age has made it tricky to enforce ownership. When copyright infringement has been committed, how is it handled? Who is liable? How do we protect our work? Over the next few pages, we’ll discuss the concepts and resources that have come about to address our rights while still encouraging the sharing of ideas and creativity.
