Protecting your creative ideas and intellectual property online

Protecting your creative ideas and intellectual property online

The internet offers unlimited opportunities for the writer or creative individual, taking just minutes to make a post that demonstrates a writing skill or artistic endeavour. However, this opportunity also means that the creative person makes themselves vulnerable to piracy, and for those whose business is driven by creativity, this could have dire financial consequences.

What is intellectual property?

Intellectual property is intangible and refers to something that has been created by the mind rather than by hand or by a machine. Such creations can be a book, an artwork, icons and symbols, brand names and inventions.

Intellectual property, despite its intangibility, is protected by law. For example, if a person comes up with an idea for a new product that they intend to develop, they should apply to have their product patented, which means that no one else on the planet can produce an identical product without infringing intellectual property law.

Why should it be protected?

One could argue that an idea cannot be copyrighted however, and this is essentially true, but what intellectual property law protects is the execution of that idea. If a person comes up with a great idea that they then develop into a saleable commodity and from which they can expect to earn money, then they have every right to protect that idea from being copied and prevent someone else cashing in on it. If people were allowed to simply copy other people’s ideas, then the life-force of creativity would be stifled and the world would become a much poorer place.

Types of threat

There are many means pirates use to discover creative ideas. These include the use of malware, an extremely harmful type of computer software that can be downloaded onto a system without the user being aware of it, and which then works to corrupt the user’s computer and perhaps read their data. Emails can carry malware and other types of threats that can disrupt systems by loading viruses or hacking computers. One particular such threat is known as bashbug, which is a computer bug that allows a hacker to work remotely, telling web servers to do whatever he or she wants, and has been known for its potential to steal private information from the computers it hacks.

Other types of threats are less invasive and can include the simple re-posting of a written work or image, for example, on someone’s blog who has not asked permission to do so nor attributed it as another’s work.

How to defend against piracy

Whilst the threats towards intellectual property seem legion, there are some steps that can be taken to prevent against them. The first is to install anti-virus and firewall software on computers to screen and remove potential threats coming in via email and internet surfing activities. Malware and other threats are constantly evolving, which means that this software needs to as well, so ensuring firewall and anti-viruses are kept up to date is vital.

Software can help to protect a computer, but what about the stuff that is posted on the internet? Although everything that is written and which can be proved substantially original is automatically protected by copyright, it does not hurt to reiterate this fact by placing a copyright symbol on web pages and posts. For writers, it is worth using a plagiarism checker to search for pages on the internet that have copied from another source. For artists and musicians, it is a good idea to protect online products, audio files and images by issuing them with a Creative Commons license.

Ultimately, if a person finds out that their work has been stolen and attempts to resolve the situation by requesting the pirate removes the piece, and fails therein, there is always the threat of legal action to fall back upon. This should always be a last resort, for apart from the cost of such a venture without any guarantee of success, going to court can be a highly stressful situation to find oneself in for six months or more.

Safety for everyone

Protecting intellectual property should however, not just be for financial considerations. In this media age with very young children who are perfectly adapted to the computer lifestyle, it is necessary to protect them against photographs and other personal items being stolen and possibly used for criminal purposes.

Creative ideas have a right to be protected just as much as a new smartphone or tablet computer, and by ensuring that computers have the best protection available, should help to keep intellectual property in the custody of the person who had the original idea.