 Okay, hi everybody. Okay, so we're gonna talk about five things WordPress users need to know about copyright. So how many of you were in my presentation yesterday? A couple. Okay, so we are gonna dig a bit deeper on copyright today, which I know some of you were really hoping we would do. So as I mentioned yesterday, and I'll mention again today, I feel like it's missing it. No, there we go. Sorry about that. There's my Twitter handle. I actually created a page on my website for you all. Those that were at my talk yesterday, I had a bitly link that was quite hard for people to kind of write down. So I created a page on the website that actually links to the handouts for both yesterday's talk and today's. And I've also put up a couple of bonuses on there. There were people yesterday asking me about GDPR. I actually put a link to the handout that I did for an iThemes webinar with Nathan Ingram on GDPR. And there's another bonus that I'll mention later today that I put out for you guys. So that's my website. That's where you're gonna find the information. I gave it the, as you can tell, I'm in the process of moving a website from anablanche.net to anablanche-rave.com, which is why the link is the way it is. I've only been married five years. Probably should have done it before now. But that's where we're at. Today we're gonna talk about five things. Oh, and there's actually only four up there, but believe me, there is probably more than five. We're gonna start with what is copyright, how long it lasts, all that kind of thing. We're gonna then talk about the difference between copyrights and trademarks very briefly, but people seem to get quite confused about that. Third, we're gonna talk about some myths. I did throw in there in our section about whether or not you're protected, which is the fifth one. I actually threw an extra slide in about stock photography, partly to address the discussion that was happening yesterday. So I wanted to make sure we talked about that. And then we will talk about fair use. I know there's some nonprofits in the room, and I really wanted to kind of discuss that and make sure we covered it for those that have questions about fair use. Okay, so this is important. Today's session is not legal advice. It's general information only, in part because, well, you know, us being here does not mean that I'm your attorney. I'm an attorney. I'm not your attorney. The other thing that's kind of important to note is I'm not currently licensed to practice in the United States. So let's be like clear about that. I work a lot with law firms. The reason I'm not practiced in the US has nothing to do with ethics. It's because I found myself living in New Mexico because my husband is active duty in the Air Force. And moving around with the Air Force sometimes can make it a little harder to continue to practice law. So that's one of the reasons I'm a communications consultant. And I work predominantly with law firms. So I have a really huge network of attorneys. And I can often connect people with someone who's the right person for them to speak to. But I'm certainly not here today looking for legal clients. That's not why I'm here. So there we go. So we are going to talk about copyright as I said. So what is copyright? This is pretty much the definition that the Act has. It protects original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, including poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software and architecture. What is not up there? It doesn't say anything about websites. But that doesn't mean that websites, their content, their images and everything else isn't covered. So that's kind of an important note. Sometimes the law includes things and moves along a little behind technology. So there's that. But I doubt even if they ever changed this definition, it would ever specifically mention websites. Okay. So we are going to talk about a lot of what we're going to talk about today. We'll be talking about in terms of kind of the pieces of it. So the text or the content and the images and software and how they relate. So they are all covered under copyright. So how long does copyright last? So it depends on several factors. It's also going to depend on companies themselves, which are legal entities, legal persons, can also earn copyright. So that can impact this somewhat. But for works curated by an individual, protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. That's going to be particularly helpful for those of you who like quotes of people long past. I actually love quotes. I'm an English major from way back. I have a master's in English as well. And I'm working on a PhD in English. So I love this kind of thing. But for works created anonymously, pseudonymously, gosh, I can't say that this morning. That just means under another name other than your own. And for hire, protection lasts 95 years from the date of publication or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever is shorter. Why that's important is because you'll see, I don't know if you guys have been on platforms like Etsy lately, but you'll actually see people in there selling images of patents that might have been filed. There is a specific rules around what the government can or cannot own. We won't really get into that today, but some of that actually does come into play when it comes to what you can sell that's in the public domain. Getty images has found themselves in trouble because they've taken images from the public domain and then tried to sell them on to people as well. And we'll have some examples of that. The next thing I just want to kind of point out is that copyright is not the same as a trademark or a patent. It's different. People like to say, is that copyrighted? I mean, I'm not going to criticize people's language. I think it's part of who we are in our culture, but in a sense copyright refers to the rights you have over something. So once as soon as something is created, there is copyright. So as soon as the shutter is pressed on a camera, there is copyright that vests in that image. As soon as you write a sentence, there is copyright vesting in that sentence. You don't necessarily need to put a C with a circle around it for something to be to have copyright protection. And that's quite important. Now that can help dissuade other people from copying it. So I'm not necessarily going to tell you not to put those on your websites, but in and of itself you don't need to have one to have copyright protection. All right. A little bit more definitions on the trademark and copyright first. So a trademark is a word, phrase, symbol and or design that identifies and distinguishes the source of goods of one party from those of another. So just yell out some trademarks that you know of. Coca-Cola? Nike. Yep. You can distinguish those goods and services from one another. It's actually one of the reasons why at the moment we'll talk about this, talk about something later. I'm going to mention hashtags and how they relate to copyright later. But a service mark is another, it's often, often comes under the same definition as trademarks. So people will often use trademark to also describe service mark. But I want to make sure you understand the difference between a trademark and a service mark. So it's a word, phrase, symbol and or design that identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than goods. So I'm going to suggest that for many of us in the room, if we're going to trademark something, really what we're going to be doing is seeking a service mark for our businesses and or the services we're offering. Now if you actually offer a source of goods, then you're going to be looking at a trademark. Now these definitions are included in the handout. All right. As I said, trademarks often use in a general sense to cover both of those. And then when you add copyright into it, that whole area of law is called intellectual property. So when you go to search for an attorney to help you with this, this kind of thing, you're going to be looking not for a copyright lawyer, you're going to be looking for an intellectual property attorney, an IP attorney. And that'll give you a little bit more of the language to be able to find the person you need. All right. Let's talk about myths. Okay. A copyright notice is needed to ensure legal protection. I actually already gave you this one already. You don't actually need a copyright notice to have legal protection. It's just a nice deterrent sometimes because that was actually the law prior to the mid-70s. So that's important to note that there's still people out there who think you need it in order to have that copyright protection. The copyright only refers to written material, some myth that, you know, if there's any photographers in the room, I know there are some photographers here, it drives them batty. That people seem to think they can kind of just, an image doesn't matter. Oops, went my backwards and stuff forwards. Okay. Copyright myth number three. As long as you credit someone, you can use the images. No. That's probably the area that most website owners, builders, bloggers get themselves into trouble with, that area. Especially on Instagram. Four. If you use client provided images, you cannot be liable. That's a myth. Even if the client's the one who's providing you all the content, you can, as a website builder developer, can potentially be liable. Yeah. Yeah. Number five. I can use images I find on Google. I will say to this is, possibly, if you find out that that image is covered by, or you can obtain a license for that image. I'm going to talk about the different kinds of license. But in general terms, please educate your clients as well. Not cool. And that actually goes for everyone. That goes for nonprofits, for profits. I don't care. You can't just pull images you find online. Okay. If it's available on unsplash pixels and depth to stock photography, then I'm cleared hot to use them. Not necessarily. Cleared hot to, sorry, that's an air force term. My husband's invaded my brain. Cleared hot, cleared hot basically is what they say to the pilots so they can take off. So it's what you can do to continue. Now the answer to this is not necessarily. We'll talk a little bit more about this. I myself love those. I personally would sometimes love to use pixels and unsplash and everything myself. But here's the thing I have found in the last six months. Things have changed. I don't believe that pixels and unsplash are actually doing a lot of due diligence to make sure that whoever's uploading those images actually owns the copyright to them. So be careful. I've had situations where I've like double clicked on the the photographer that it kind of gives credit to even if it's a commercial creative commons commercial no attribution license. Took a little bit about that in a second. I clicked on the guy and I realized very quickly he had not taken the photo. He did not own the copyright to that image he had put up there that supposedly was covered by a license. Now we'll talk about whether or not you could rely on that license legally a little bit later but I'm going to say to you please do your due diligence. Like I love those sites like the next person but I'll talk to you about how sometimes free is not free in the long run and I want you to think about that. I also want you to think about the ethics of it too. So the final myth we're going to talk about is that copyright infringement isn't a big deal and doesn't cost much money if we're busted. I know it seems like that. I mean the internet's a big place. How many of you have gotten a nice or not so nice email from someone saying how you use my image? Only one person? Does that mean that none of you in this room or all of you in this room can tell me 100% that you are certain that you have never committed copyright infringement on any of your websites? So you can all tell me 100% you have never committed copyright on your infringement on your websites? Well we can talk about that because I think how many of you use memes on your social media? It may or may not be enough. Yeah but that may or may not be enough if that person isn't the copyright owner you could exactly that's what I'm saying. You need to be 100% sure you know and if you don't know through those sites don't use them is what I'm saying. I mean I know that's hard like that's hard to hear but we'll talk about how much this can cost you and I'm here to kind of help you for it to not cost you that amount. Yes so you're going to need to go to a stock photography website where you're paying for the license. I mean like you could try tin-eye and see if that helps you. Tin-eye so as in an eye so tin and eye as one way but I mean this is something that people need to think about. T-I-N. All right so these are the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under section 106 title 17 of the US Code. I'm not going to read through this but I wanted you to see that this is what the law says this is actually straight out of the section. What this means is that you taking an image and putting it like downloading it saving it onto your hard drive and then putting it up on your website actually refers to reproducing the work because when you save a copy you'll create when you save a copy to your hard drive you're creating a copy. If you prepare derivative works so I know many of you and I've look I've done the same thing with images I found on pixels and unsplash because it is they market it as a creative commons commercial no attribution license which should mean you can create derivative works from that. Now derivative works is anything where you change it so if I crop it if I add in like add text on top of it any of that that's creating a derivative work okay so you have to make sure you have the appropriate license for that even if you have a commercial commercial license for an image that doesn't mean you have a license to create a derivative work okay let's talk about commercial versus personal because I know some of you are like look I'm only doing this on a personal blog yeah maybe there's a few of you I'm going to say to you that commercial is a pretty broad definition so commercial use may be commonly defined as that which is intended for commercial promotional endorsement advertising or merchandising purposes now if you truly have a personal blog where you're only doing things that maybe your family is reading you have no advertising at all on the blog you're not trying to sell anything you have no affiliate links you are not a brand ambassador for anything then maybe it could be argued that that's a personal personal use but I mean this stuff is incredibly limited so I'll give you some examples of commercial branded company websites brochures adverts a meme shared on a business facebook page that you don't own the copyright for and you did not create a business presentation or product packaging this also goes for nonprofits because in this context a nonprofit is a tax status okay not commercial or personal next personal or non-commercial use may be commonly defined as that which is not for commercial gain but remember everything I just said because really that's going to be limited to what I've got up there very very simple you're printing a copy for your personal reference or it's like a a Christmas letter for the family you know something that will never like will never have a commercial use like never have a commercial meaning I guess unless you're someone super famous that is going to sell their Christmas I don't know I mean who does that all right so it's another little military phrase because I was on the army myself BLBLUF bottom line up front images must be licensed you need the appropriate license whether for personal use or for commercial use because very often those creative commons licenses I was mentioning will tell you if it's for personal or commercial these types of licenses include the commercial okay this is whether it's creative commons or not so if you speak to a photographer who's doing your family photos and you want to use that family photo on your business website they are more likely to give you a personal license because that's their standard as a family photographer to give you a personal use license you're going to have to ask them hey can I get a commercial license for this so that I can put it on my business website if you don't do that you are committing copyright infringement because if you use something that you have personal license for in a commercial manner it is copyright infringement yes but you're only paid for their services you do not own the copyright to that image unless you buy the copyright to that image okay so you have commercial derivative which is what I was talking about where you can take an image and you know do things to it and you have commercial attribution which is where you can use it for commercial uses but you must credit the photographer and you must say where the image came from you know that that's the photographer and or the copyright owner and then the final version which I don't have up here which is commercial non attribution which is what unsplash and pexels use which sounds great in principle but I increasingly got some concerns about it so let's talk about fair use who's heard of the term fair use about half the room okay so fair use is an exception to copyright infringement it's a defense actually so even if you are covered under the fair use exception or exemption that doesn't actually mean you have a committed copyright infringement there's just a kind of a complete defense to it but it's more complicated than that so fair use is any copying of copyrighted materials done for a limited and transformative purpose I'm not going to get into too much detail on that but examples include that you've used the material to comment upon criticize or parody a copyrighted work most commonly you're going to see this when people create those parody songs so they're usually going to be covered by that fair fair use exemption as long as it is very clearly a parody those kinds of uses can actually be done without the permission of a copyright holder one of the most famous users of this in the music world is probably Weirdo Jankovic right yeah see now you know what I'm talking about okay so how do you determine fair use legally there's a four-factor test now if this is something that you're super interested in learning more about please send me an email because this in and of itself could be it in the entire talk is it personal or commercial what's the nature of the copyrighted work how much of it is being used okay and what's the effect of use on the potential market or the value of the copyrighted material so for example you can't just take a textbook and copy all of it and give it to your to give it to every single one of your students even though you're in an educational environment which you'll see there is part of the part of the classroom use exception there are still limits so for those of you who I actually was thinking and I need to think a little bit more about whether or not word camps would be included in this fair use exception haven't necessarily seen anything that I'm particularly worried about here um but we are in a classroom or a classroom like setting we're here in person now the question is would word can't be considered nonprofit educational institution and the argument could be made well there you go so the answer is no word camp is not covered by this fair use exemption so that also goes honestly for most nonprofits and it actually goes for many educational environments so if you're teaching a class a community class that doesn't necessarily mean you're covered by the fair use exemption if you're teaching a class for a university then you're good to go as long as the university is a non-profit educational institution okay so we're going to move on I wanted to cover that though okay but this copyright thing isn't really that big a deal right I mean so many of you have told me like no one's ever sent you this letter this doesn't really matter does it so I said the copyright is vested as soon as something is created that means it doesn't have to be registered with the government for non-registered works that is works that receive common law copyright protections like we've been discussing that can cost you actual damages and what they call disgorgement of profits and what that really means is if you've made a profit in any way shape or form out of what you have you know copyright you have used that belongs to someone else then you will be ordered to pay that money to someone else now they can the court considers this pretty broadly so for example I talked about a meme on a on a business facebook page they may actually look at how long did you have that image up for and what were your profits for your company for a particular period of time how many clients do you normally get from that resource and then they do a you know a formula they figure it out so this can cost you a lot of money often that's why I say if someone does send you a letter and they send you a bill for the use of the image that you maybe even unknowingly used it may be cheaper to pay that than to go to court next is registered work so what I mean by that images generally speaking images although also written work that has been registered with the copyright office the US government that can be done for a small fee someone mentioned to me yesterday they have a situation where they're a client who hasn't paid them but has received some images from a shoot and they've told the client look you can't use those images until I'm paid and the clients will watch me and and my general advice is I'd go read the cost of registering those images could pay off very nicely for you because if you register those images it could actually be anywhere from $750 to $30,000 per use to the person who's used that image all the way through to $150,000 in a statutory penalty so that's automatic if it's willful infringement now in that case they've had a conversation she said you cannot use this until you pay me they use it anyway it's pretty willful okay this is why I know people still want to say to me oh but it isn't a big deal this is why I'm here talking about it because I don't want this to happen to you registered with the copyright office so they don't have to be registered but if you're a photographer or you're a videographer I'm going to tell you that registration with the copyright office should be part of your cost of doing business because genuinely down the line if things happen if you have a client who may be hands-on images to someone else they get published in a magazine then this becomes like very much worth the cost of the registration because it's minimal compared to this this is also where an attorney is more likely to take your case okay because if it's the first one it may not be worth it for them to take the case and it may not be worth it for you to bring the case but in the second case if you have a very image-heavy presence it's not a bad idea yes yeah they do it as a bulk there's certain things that the copyright office will do where you can uh it's cheaper if you register more images at the same time so you can I I'm not a hundred percent sure because I'm not it's not I'm not doing it all the time but I do work um one of my main clients is actually an attorney who works with photographers so I spend a lot of time writing about these issues uh no you would have to register every single page each time you change it I just think it might be yeah not cost effective so the question was can you register a website itself um okay are you protected so here's some things to think about um because I'm not going to leave you with all the doom and deliver I'm going to give you some ways to move forward with this so make sure you have a contract and the contract clearly details copyright ownership so anytime you sign a contract with a client uh if you are a website owner and you're working with brands make sure you're very clear on who owns the copyright to the material that you're producing if you're a content producer same thing goes is it work for higher or is it something where you retain the copyright and you're giving them a commercial license to use it depending on the jurisdiction indicated in the contract get local counsel uh each contract will tell you what venue or jurisdiction the contract applies to read your contracts I mean even my favorite clients who I love uh daily I still read all the contracts because every now and then a mistake gets made uh maybe the rates wrong like we've discussed run rate and the rate in the contract is not the same read your contracts be careful of the use of images of identifiable persons without a specific model release I love that people have been taking photos of speakers at this conference and on one level I don't know that anyone here would come after you but if you've taken a photo of an identifiable person at this conference and you put it up on your website and you don't get permission from them to do that then legally speaking you're infringing on their publicity rights okay now it can be as simple as this send them an email hey I took this photo of you here's a copy of the photo um because you know they maybe want to know that they don't look terrible because if the image presents them in an unflattering light then you can you can find yourself in trouble if you're using the image in a commercial in a commercial entity so on your website uh or on your facebook page then in one sense uh you're using them for publicity and advertising and you need a model release to that so it can be as simple as send them an email send them a picture and say hey do you mind if I put this image up in my post about word word can't Birmingham do you mind if I include that on my website they write back and say yep sure no problem guess what that's permission and you can keep a copy of that so you're gonna get oh okay there is an exception to this and I'm fine with that I mean it's contemporaneous whatever um thanks for letting you know I appreciate that um there's a couple of things that you need to know about this this is not considered a public environment yes oh gosh guys I am like so not I'm I'm I'm not here to like I'm really not the wet blanket I want to spend more time with you so you know that and you're all would like to live in my house but that's okay okay but just be aware of that so um somebody was telling me about they run events and we were talking about maybe some ways around that so very often when you buy a ticket to an event it will be included on the ticket that there's a model release so just be aware of that too so if you're going to go after someone make sure that you're on solid ground as well yes so to really cover yourself I would say just you know have a clipboard with that statement at the top and have them sign it with their name and then you probably you would need to check with your local attorney like an attorney in your state but that could be a potential solution to that where you just don't have any issue having it as a publicly available sign probably good although someone could argue I didn't read it or I was now for you particularly if you're dealing with children you're going to make sure that a parent or guardian is signing that on their behalf yeah I would just make sure you have something they could sign a new good and you can just do it as a sheet where like you could do 20 names on the sheet yeah yeah so public areas technically well for public areas you can take photos of people without their permission you can however be very careful with children and publishing photos of children and be very careful if that person is you can see their faces so what I say to people is if you want to take a crowd shot I think like you're at a parade and you want to kind of get the crowd in take photos of the backs of their heads because you still kind of get the atmosphere but you're not necessarily going to run into that visible people issue if you do take a photo of a person and then you're going to publish it really it is best you can there's some really great you like good ways there's some good workflow management system so i use for example dub-sado you can create a form on there where on the fly you have an ipad someone can you know sign to give their their motor release if especially if it's an event like that where you've taken a photo of a visible person so just be aware of some of these things it can kind of become part of your workflow so it's not so there's a little less friction in this all right defend your copyright please for all of us actually defend your copyright because in order to have these right if you don't defend your copyright then you can be held to have abandoned it and so say one person takes your image and you don't do anything about it and then they hand it off to someone else who hands it off to someone else and it ends up on a billboard that's happened it happens a lot it actually happens a lot in the sports and athletic industry so my husband i mentioned the story yesterday my husband is an ultra marathon runner crazy absolutely crazy he's also six foot three probably two to three times a month he has pictures of his stolen from his instagram account that appear on fitness magazine instagram feeds now i haven't actually i haven't yet sent any of them invoices but i regularly do dcma take down notices for him on two grounds one he is the photographer usually he'll do them as selfies in the middle of his training sessions right he'll stick it up on a tree take you know run past it take the camera off or do a selfie while he's in the middle of a training session but two it's also the publicity rights he's visibly it's him in the photo so there's two grounds upon which he'll take that down be careful with instagram facebook if somebody has infringed on your copyright and they say no the first time don't take that as like verbatim tell him again no that's my image here's when i posted it first here's where i took it okay um this person you know reposted it at this time my favorite with instagram is they often tag him which is how we find out they think credit is enough and credit is not enough okay be aware of default work for higher copyright laws if you're doing work for other people and you want to retain copyright be aware of the contracts and what it says about who owns what if you are someone who has subcontractors and you want to put work for higher in your contracts as the way that the copyright is going to work what that means is the person buying the content or the creative work uh is going to own the copyright to that once it's transferred you know once they've been paid for it you as the the contracting company will own that work that may be how you want to do things i have some clients that that is the basis upon which i do the work but be aware that will cost you more okay i have the copyright transfer fee if that's what you want know the difference if you're a developer know the difference between gpl open source and proprietary code and software i mean i hope that there's no one i have to say that to you but it's up there anyway if you are developing software this is something i'm going to say specifically to you check with your attorney there's been some recent i mean in the last three months changes to what software can be patented so that's specifically for the developers um and that and and what is covered by copyright so that's specifically for them in relation to code these are the three final ones and then we'll kind of briefly chat about stock photography consider indemnity clauses protecting you spelling mistake there from copyright infringement claims arising from client provided contents we said that earlier that you can be liable because your client has given you content that infringes copyright so one way to protect yourself or to limit that liability is to include an indemnity or waiver clause within your contract that says you will not be held responsible indemnifies you against legal liability be held responsible for the copyright claims of another individual so it will just mean that if you get sued you can kind of hold your contract up and say uh-uh like this is not on me because my contract says that it's not on me consider client education about copyrighted material as an investment in prevention and i realize i'd use the phrase copyrighted uh in the way that i said at the beginning not to so it is kind of part of the language um education honestly pays dividends down the long run uh and and i want you know you educate them and you're not going to have that issue where you have to rely on that indemnification okay understand that if you do register sorry understand that if you want those statutory damages that i mentioned like the big money you do need to register with the copyright office but that in order to have copyright and protection you don't need to do anything okay it is it is just simply because you've created it all right let's talk about stock photography very briefly so free is often not free in the long run um it's actually made me rethink and go back and maybe change some images out especially with what i've discovered recently about pexels and unsplash um look for creative commons for commercial use and then check on your attribution requirements if you are going to go down that route so one thing i suggest if you do go down that route and you really sort of be like i just don't know that i can 100 make sure but it has a creative commons for commercial use license with or without attribution what i would encourage you to do is maybe create an excel spreadsheet that has the file name or the name of the image the date you downloaded it what the what the commercial license type is um all of that information in one place because if someone comes back to you and said actually that's my image you may be able to rely on that license that you believe you you have as a at least a partial defense now i that may well be tested in court in the next few months because i suspect that as the original photographers for some of these images start finding out there will start being suits against pexels and unsplash yes yes it's just personal only right like no commercial okay there you go so the the kind of learning lesson from that is read the licenses and know what they say you can do and what you can't do and remember what that derivative means so in that case what they're saying is they're going to give you a derivative license but they're going to require you to make substantial changes to it so watch that as i said do you do diligence record where they come from and i'm increasingly getting to the point where i think it's a good idea in your descriptions or your old titles to include the license type on your uploaded media because i'm wondering whether or not that might actually not help if that you know if a copyright owner comes along and they can see you genuinely thought that that was the license type you might find that they go okay we're not going to go after you will go after this other person over here but we'll see as i said remember credit is not enough i say this particularly for brands or people selling products the amount of times one of the other things that has happened and i use my husband as an example but you know often he'll wear a t-shirt that he's bought or he'll have a hat on or a pair of shoes on and that brand will take the image and use it and say well you're wearing you're wearing our stuff yes but he wasn't wearing it to advertise or promote you and he didn't give you permission to infer that he's somehow endorsing your company unless you know you have an ambassador contract so bear that in mind i have much deeper articles on that stuff if that's something you're interested in so what actually happens if you get sued so without statutory damages generally speaking most intellectual property attorneys will recommend against a straight you know a lawsuit because the money's just not there it's not cost benefit is just not there and that's something to bear in mind that's where if you've registered the images they might be more likely to take it but even if lawsuit isn't the way you're going to go that doesn't mean that you can't do anything so they'll often be dcma takedown notices does everyone know what they are does anyone not know what a dcma takedown notice is okay so it's the digital copyright millennium act did you know millennium copyright act i'm looking down here because for some reason i say it and i don't say the whole act very often it basically is what happens if you put that you submit a takedown notice to the ISP of who hosts the website and they're the ones who have to comply with the law and take it down so the cease and desist letters that's going to go directly to the person that has infringed your copyright or it'll come to you if you're the one that has has been alleged to have a friend infringed copyright now what i recommend with that is chat to your attorney and see if they will create a a template cease and desist letter for you or just do it when your first situation comes up with a cease and desist letter and then you may be able to use that as a template going down the road so you don't necessarily need to have your attorney get involved at the cease and desist letter either at level the final one is a licensing demand or invoice and in fact you might want to do these kind of this is not really an order you might kind of switch around depending on the situation so a licensing demand letter is where you get a letter where they say hey that really should have been a commercial license and so here's the cost for our commercial license with an added kind of fee for the fact that you used it it was an unauthorized use they could just send you or you could just send an invoice hey we noticed you use this image of ours here's the invoice here's the thing even if they take the image down at that point doesn't mean the copyright infringement hasn't happened that invoice and I've seen this happen multiple times if the invoice depending on the level of where your small claims court sits if it's under or over five thousand or wherever it sits you may be able to enforce that payment of that invoice in small claims court so sometimes you don't necessarily have to get you know the big guns and pay big money to a lawyer to get all this stuff done you can do it a lot of it yourself but what happens if you're accused of copyright infringement all right and in responding to claims there's a few defenses you actually independently created it that can happen sometimes you get images or graphics that look remarkably similar or even text that looks remarkably similar and you really didn't it was independently created sometimes that will involve some proof but sometimes it might be that you have a draft of it or you have images in the same session that you can show to show that you independently created it that it was innocent that's very very rare i have to tell you extremely rare so unless it genuinely is innocent don't go that direction you know innocent might be like your six year old it's probably not going to be you why i have status instead of statute of limitations but there you go statute of limitations is actually a three year statute of limitations on infringement of copyright so the infringement happened three years ago now what i will tell you is you might have put it up on your website three years ago but if it's still there the infringement is today okay um their use which i mentioned earlier is is a defense you previously obtained a license so this is the example where you try to do the right thing with unsplash and pexels you think you have a license but maybe it may or may not be a legitimate license but that could be a defense it could be that you obtained a license from the from the copyright owner and they forgot okay that happens uh they abandoned it now i would argue that in some cases some of the means that are around have been abandoned um there are times when something is so famous that the likelihood of someone coming after you is pretty low but that doesn't mean it's not copyright infringement you know what i'm saying this is where the cost-benefit analysis comes in i'm certainly not encouraging you to break the law please don't tell anyone i said that because i'm not the final one is misuse yes no no no statute of limitations is based on the copyright owner suing you that has nothing to do with abandonment yes so um from the time that the copyright infringement was committed now usually speaking this is going to be an offline thing because if something is still online then the infringement happened today so if i um printed a made a printed document um today like say for instance i created something like this today the and i copied someone else's work they would have three years to file a lawsuit or send me a demand letter for this uh online as i said if it's still up then copyright infringement is still happening misused by the owner now um that that's a fairly limited situation and we probably need to talk facts i will give you a very specific example i'm going to throw these resources up but i will tell you that these are all on the handout all of these links are in the handout um getty images found themselves into trouble is anyone here got a getty images demand letter yeah a couple of people so i'm not going to say too much about that i have opinions but i'm also being recorded um what i will say is this there was there is a fairly well-known photographer who donated quite a few of her images to the national archives she did it so the images went into public domain so people were using them they were crediting her for them but they were in public domain somebody had no idea who this is subject of that this has uh been the subject of completed litigation a person representing getty believed that they were doing the right thing but they took some of those public domain images and made them available for licensing and sale uh without the permission actually of the national archives or the photographer they then proceeded to send demand letters to people who used those images and said you owe us licensing fees they also sent a letter to the photographer who was using her own image which was actually part of the deal with the archives and and basically threatened to sue her we're going to charge her millions of dollars she turned around and sued them and she won millions and millions of dollars that was only in the last few months so what i'm also going to say to you is sometimes you will get a demand letter and you won't have done anything wrong like you may not have actually infringed copyright so look at it don't be terrified or scared when that happens because i you genuinely can't be around the blogging world long i've i've had people send me demand letters that aren't right um but at the end of the day it's really important and i've also had situations where i've i've written on university websites so and they've been in the course of criticism and we've had to explain to the copyright owner look this is in the course of criticism they were genuinely they were book review book reviews you can't get much more critical than that and we actually had to do some education for the copyright owner on on how we were using it and the exception that applied or exemption that applied so just be aware that learning this stuff for yourself can can help it doesn't mean just because you get a letter that it's that it's kosher okay all right this is pretty much the slide if you were here yesterday i i had then like interest rates and insurance premiums sometimes the cost of consulting an attorney is the cost of doing business so that's my final slide i have a couple of minutes for questions but i'll be hanging around afterwards yes okay so sharing youtube videos on your site um this is actually really interesting if you embed the video directly from youtube you're probably good okay if you download the video and then upload it on your site not good like plain and simple not good that's copyright infringement because you're making a copy of it but if you're embedding it and because really if you're embedding it then that is linked that is the original upload that you're embedding into your site if you don't know what embedding is go to the happiness bar and ask she'll it will help anybody else stock photos on ebay do you mean like a hard copy photo oh so it's a really old photo okay okay you said 1940s okay so remember what we said about copyright owner plus 70 years um what i have seen is this someone might buy those that doesn't mean you own the copyright to the image you might you own a print of the image is what you own when you buy them but you could do a couple of things to potentially see if you could use them see if you can track down the photography shop some of them do still exist and you may be able to get a license to use that image well yes but the but if they're from the 1940s they'll generally have the studio on the back of them okay because images from that day the studios would print on the back or on the front of them yeah yeah yeah but often the studio's name will be on them yes yeah no you want the glass image you own the glass image that doesn't necessarily mean you own the rights to reproduce it now if it's old enough if it's in public domain and you have that glass then it is likely that you will have the the copyright to it like you'd sorry you won't have the copyright to it but you will have the right to reproduce it because it's in the public domain do you see the difference okay putting a link on a website infringer's copyright honestly i'd probably need to sit down and do a little bit thinking about whether there was a situation where that could be infringement my general sense is just a link like you're directing to somewhere else probably not however i'd need to think about it there could be a situation where that is the case actually let me say something quickly about hashtags because i know he talked about that this is really interesting and i actually just i wrote an article a couple of months ago about it so hashtag somebody asked me can a hashtag be trademarked hey it is a good question if you're using them all the time the answer to that question seems to be from the copyright office that a hashtag can only be trademarked if it is so specific that it relates to one source of goods or services so there might be a very very specific situation where it can be trademarked but in general it's unlikely that a hash hashtag will be trademarked some companies have attempted it and they've locked they have not been able to trademark well if you if you have a trademark for the business name already and the and that business name in a hashtag is not kind of generic you might be able to trademark it but it it has to be a very specific situation the yeah there's a lot of other things that we could say about trademarks and how it relates to businesses oh one thing i will tell you if you have on her instagram use this hashtag and i will use your image it does not mean that you have permission using a hashtag in that description does not give you permission to use someone's images i think we actually have to be done so if you need to leave go right ahead but yes what about music that's included in all of this yeah so when i gave the original definition copyright in relation to music is is just the same as um as content i mean it is content but it's just the same as written word and photographs yeah you have to be very careful using music you have to get a license to use it on your websites thank you so much i know these sessions are a huge amount of information all right um i have a stack of business cards and i have a few of my uh a few of the stickers up here but thank you