Biz Tips Blog: Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips

4 Steps Against Content Theft

(Note: To find out how to protect yourself and your business, you'll want to attend our teleseminar next Tuesday October 30th; for more info go here: www.blogsquadteleseminars.com/JH/ )

A Realtor friend tells me a competitor stole the photos she took of a condo and posted on the Web. The competitor's listing was for a similar condo in the same location. Evidently, it saved him some time and effort by lifting her photos and using them for his listing!

So she called him up and firmly demanded he take the photos off his listing. He complied. But what do you do when a lazy and unethical scoundrel doesn't correct the infringement?

I recently came across an article, "4 Steps to Combat Website Plagiarism" by Kelly Sims, published in Entire Web Newsletter. Here's a summary of things you can do.

1. Check the Web. A great tool to use in the protection of your website content is www.copyscape.com. Simply enter your website URL and it will scan the web for you. This is a free service, but if you have been a frequent victim of copyright infringement, you might want to consider their paid service, which automatically scans the web regularly for any duplicates of your content.
2. Contact the offender. Keep your first contact civil. The owner of the site may not be the writer.
3. Send a cease and desist order. You do not need to hire a lawyer to create one for you. Search for "cease and desist order templates" on the Web.
   

Is your content vulnerable?

The response to our special teleseminar on protecting your intellectual property on the Web, on October 30, has been overwhelming.

Clearly this important topic has struck a nerve for online entrepreneurs and businesses.

Just read this email we got from one person:

"I work for a software company and one of our competitors copied entire sections of our website and used it as their own.

They're not just a fly-by-night operation either - we're talking about a venture capital backed start-up firm!

We demanded they remove it, but they took a year to do so. Their product can't even do what ours does and now they claim it can!

It makes me so MAD...

Open Source Software is Worth Checking Out

Following on my post yesterday about how important I believe it is to be able to create your own web pages, today's post is about how to get free or low cost software to create your web pages.

A few weeks ago on Blogging and Beyond, we interviewed James Gaskin about open source software. He shared info about a site called theopencd.org that distributes free software that can replace the expensive software you're probably familiar with. Me being me, an active experimenter, I immediately went to the site and purchased a cd with 33 software programs on it. The cost was $10.

NOTE: theopencd.org is no longer a functioning site. The OpenCD is available here instead.

There's a lot on this disc that I will never use, however, a couple of things caught my eye:

HTML: Why You Need to Learn

One of the most important skills I've learned in the past 10 years of doing business online is how to create simple web pages and edit HTML code. I don't mean complex stuff, but enough to be able to make quick changes on a web page, set up a sales page without having to wait eons for a web designer and then pay big bucks, and how to tweak copy in my blog.

Generally I use simple "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) tools like FrontPage to create my web pages, but sometimes you need to go a little further and "hand code" something.

It came up again recently when I was making some minor edits to complete a registration page for our upcoming teleseminar on how to protect your intellectual property rights.

Jay Hollander, our guest, uses a service mark in the title of his blog: ExpertPreneurLaw^SM Blog. The service mark is the superscript SM after "law."

5 Legal Questions Online Entrepreneurs Should Know

In September Patsi and I interviewed attorney Jay Hollander about how to protect one's creative assets when doing business online. During the course of the interview we realized there was a whole lot more we need to know about this important subject for entrepreneurs and bloggers. So we did something about it...

On October 30, we are presenting a teleseminar with intellectual property rights attorney Jay Hollander. Every business professional who wants to do business online should know the basic facts about intellectual property on the Internet in order to protect their brands and creative works against legal liability.

While dispelling many common myths regarding intellectual property, Hollander will help professionals understand how to handle these five key issues critical to online businesses:

1.    How should one select and protect a trademark?

2.    How does one identify copyrightable creative works and use copyright law to protect their work?

3.    How do you identify and protect company trade secrets?

4.    How do you secure legal ownership and property rights to websites created for you by others?

5.    How do you reduce the threat of being sued for intellectual property infringement by you or those who contribute to your blog, website or information products?

To get more information, and to register, click here. Even if you cannot attend, when you register you will get a CD of the audio program and we pay for the shipping!