IP rights and their importance in the creative industries.

 

In this blog post we will talk about IP rights we will cover what IP (intellectual property) is why it’s important as a website designer/ developer and will cover copyright and why it’s important.

What do we mean by the term IP?

What is IP (intellectual property) refers to anything that you have created from your own mind, this could be a design, story, invention and many more. There are different types of IP such as

Copyright – Getting your work copyrighted protects it from being used by others without your permission. Copyright is automatically given to any illusive, musical, web content, databases and more that you have created so long as you created it from your own mind. To let people, know that your work is copyrighted you can put the copyright symbol along with your name and the year of creation on the work.

Designs – You can register any designs that you have created to protect the appearance of the design. Registering your designs appearance covers the colour, shape, pattern, decoration and configuration of the design. This means that someone can’t copy or steal your design.

Trade marks – A trademark or logo is a graphic that distinguishes your brand/ company from others. A trademark graphic can include words, colours and symbols. You can show others that your trademark is registered by including the TM symbol or the circle with the R symbol.

 Patents – A patent gives you legal rights to an invention that you have created. Getting a patent for your invention protects excludes other people from attempting to make, use or sell your invention without your permission.

To find out how to register for any of these IPs click here

 

Why do IP rights in the creative industries matter?

Intellectual property rights are important especially in the creative industries as it allows you to protect any work that you create for yourself or for clients, this helps stop others from stealing your work or ideas and passing them off as their own. Protecting your work also allows you to be able to generate an income from the all of work that you create and develop.

Protecting any content that you create is important as it means that if anyone wants to use anything that you have created, they must obtain your permission first, if you do not give them permission to use your work first then they can’t use it.

Why is copyright important?

Copyright is important for any creative industry as it protects any content that you have created. In the website design and development industry copyright is important as it protects not only the work that you have created for yourself but it also protects the work that you create for your clients, this is especially important as if you don’t copyright the content you make for clients then they are at risk of their branding and content being stolen and being unable to make any profit off their work. This could harm both your and your clients reputation and could harm both you and your clients income.

Copyright protection is a form of legal protection that proves that the content you have created legally belongs to you because it legally belongs to you this helps protect you from anyone trying to use or copy your work without your knowledge or permission.

For more information about copyright protection and what you can or can’t protect click here

Remember to check all the content that you use that you don’t have ownership of to see if it has copyright protection before you use it. Some content online can be free to use as long as you credit the creator of the content. For example unsplash is a website that supplies free images that you can download to use for commercial and no commercial use, however you aren’t able to sell any of the images that you source from there.

What are your views on the topic?

I think that intellectual property rights are extremely important especially for people in the creative industries or for small content creators as it helps them protect any content that they have created especially if they intend to make a living off of their content.

I have learned a lot from researching information on this topic and will definitely be going through all my work to check that I have protected any content I have created and will check any content that I have sourced for my work previously to ensure that I am not using any content that has been copyrighted. I will definitely be careful in future when creating any content for clients to make sure that all the content is protected so that neither me or the client loses money or loses the right to content that we have created.