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When it comes to the Internet, the simplest advice of all is if you want to keep your Intellectual Property your own and don’t want it to be copied, stolen or abused – just don’t publish it digitally. Whether your works are words, photographs, websites or anything else that can be described as ‘creative’ this is the only sure way to protect yourself!

But, realistically, it’s almost impossible these days to run any business without making a certain amount of examples and information about your business easily available online. In this day and age you can pretty much say the same about your private life with the prevalence of Social Networking sites like Facebook and Twitter!

Now, here’s a short story for you by way of example; I put together a little t-shirt design for a bit of fun on a site I use – I am not going to mention the site here, for the simple reason that despite feeling let down by them, it remains one of my favourite sites and I’ve no wish to get myself banned!

This t-shirt – drop your politics and personal opinions here – was a joke about (in my opinion) the Princess Diana inquest fiasco. Having seen many a ludicrous debate at the time from conspiracy theorists I decided to have a joke with a couple of friends.

In bullet points, here is the chain of events;

The t-shirt design was uploaded to the site on 6th April 2008 It received a number of positive comments from like minded individuals who took it in the vein it was intended over the next couple of days About 6 or 7 days later someone sent me the URL to an article from an Australian Newspaper about an Australian t-shirt company who had seemingly copied the idea Strictly speaking this is not a breach of copyright as nobody owns ‘words’ or the image of Diana, but for a company claiming to be ‘original’ it’s pretty poor form A number of other comments arrived in the ensuing couple of days which led me to believe that other users of the site saw what this company had done as a copy, and a very nice lady in Australia approached them on my behalf to ask. They responded that they had been sitting on the design for five years? (does that really sound very likely?) Rather perturbed that what I had done as essentially a joke was getting mass media coverage on TV and in the press In Australia and being used for financial gain, I decided to write to the newspapers and TV companies who had run items – no replies To get the company to crawl out of the woodwork (they had already been given my email address and had ignored mail from me) I posted another t-shirt design on the site accusing them by name of stealing ideas, the description said that I would happily remove it if they provided the documentary proof they claimed to have Sure enough they did crawl out from under their stone, got that t-shirt removed – which I had expected, and responded with a comment that they had documentary proof their ‘design’ preceded mine (calling me a ‘whinging Pom’ – which for someone who sells themselves as ‘creative’ it’s not a very imaginative insult is it!) I responded telling them I would remove my original design when I’d seen that proof, by this time I’m actually getting bored of the whole thing – but I’m not really the type of person to let things drop Of course I have not had a response, never saw any proof and still firmly believe they stole my idea Then the website removed my original, saying that I had breached copyright in using the image I had – which is not the case – it was taken from the public domain and manipulated before use The website again passed my details on to the company to allow them to contact me – of course they never did.

The morals of the story: Expect to have anything you put online stolen, always place a Copyright notice on your website and always be prepared to put up a fight on pure principle!

(The original article including images for comparison remains online with names and links intact and has done so since April 2008)