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If you are just starting your website, you are pretty safe with respect to Copyright law. Most of your traffic will come from personal and local sources. You won’t be in the public eye for a while. When you are still small, and you are acting in good faith, if you are caught violating Copyright law there is a very good chance you’ll receive a letter from the owner. It will state what he thinks you are using without his permission. He’ll likely ask you to change or remove the images, photos, or text he claims are his, or he’ll offer to sell or license them to you. However, anything can happen. Not everyone is so friendly, so you should still be cautious when using any text, images or sound you don’t own. Especially once you’ve developed some web presence and are generating revenue. Still, being sued for violating Copyright law is always a risk whether you are big or small. Ultimately, some of the risks of going to court could be having your website shut down or having a judgment entered against you. You could end up owing your opponent for all the damages he is able to prove he sustained, plus his attorney’s fees and costs, and any of your profits. In some cases, your opponent may also seek statutory damages, which means that he can still sue even if he didn’t sustain any actual damages and you didn’t make any profit. In such case, if the court finds you willfully violated his Copyright, you could be on the hook for as much as $150,000 per violation. You cannot always defend yourself by claiming the images, text or sounds you used were not marked with a Copyright notice. A person has a legal Copyright to any text, sound or image he creates as soon as it is created. You cannot modify any text, sound or image and claim the right to use it. The modified work still belongs to the original creator and is known as a derivative work. Finally, you may end up in criminal trouble should you be prosecuted for your Copyright infringement, though it must at least be proven you willfully committed the act for commercial advantage or private financial gain.
For more information on Copyright Law, I recommend starting with a publication from the United States Copyright Office: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf and its website: http://www.copyright.gov.
So, now that we know how much trouble we can get into, here are some general guidelines, which for now will exclude the fair use and public domain exceptions. Also keep in mind I’m taking a very conservative risk management position. Due to the brevity of this article I’m skipping many exceptions that might work in your favor.
Images: Only use photographs, video, graphics or images (“images”) you have created, own or have a license to use on your website. If you personally create them, you own them and can use them as you wish. Because you are the creator, you own the Copyright. If an employee or someone you hire creates images for you, you generally own them because they are works for hire. However, to be completely safe, always have them sign an agreement that specifically gives you complete Copyright ownership to the images they create for you, or at minimum a license to use the subject material as needed. If you prefer to use a company which provides stock images to satisfy your needs, be sure to obtain adequate written assurances you are indemnified and held harmless for using the purchased images. This way, you may be protected should your actions be found to violate Copyright law. Finally, if you find images you’d like to use, you can always contact the owner and ask her if you can use them. Consent through email with an exact description of how her images will be used, along with a citation stating it is her work is pretty failsafe and can serve as a great networking opportunity. Caveat, be sure she is the owner and not just claiming to be the owner, so do your homework. Finally, there is the issue of preserving your images so you can prove when they were created. You own a Copyright to an image as soon as you create it, but what if someone else creates an identical image, all on his own, sometime subsequently? Technically, you are the Copyright owner, but you need to be able to prove it by showing you created it first. A certain way to do this is to pay a third party to hold your images in escrow, along with a notarized affidavit as to the date it was created, or to file the image with the United States Copyright Office. However, in most cases, if you have an alternate way to reliably back up and date your web content, this should suffice. I leave such matters of date stamping electronic data to future articles by the Doodlebit gurus.
Text: With respect to text, I refer you to all I’ve said about images above. The same rules apply to text as to images. Granted there is a fair use exception I won’t get into in this article, but generally, if you are going to quote someone or use their text in any way, first seek their written permission in the same fashion I previously recommended. If you get no response, then I suggest taking a crash course in the Fair Use Doctrine. With a little reading you’ll be comfortable with exactly how much you can specifically quote and still be safe. As a rule of thumb you are probably ok if you stick to a few sentences and give a specific reference to the original writer, or Copyright owner. Finally, I realize anything you write is taken from other sources. You read it or heard it somewhere, so how do you make your text unique so it does not violate Copyright law? Here my guidance is to do your best to remember what we learned in high school about plagiarism. Study the subject, put it in your own words, and give credit where credit is due. Give your citations and references. Link your readers to the sources you’ve used.
Music: Generally, what applies to images and text applies to music. However, I would caveat that music is a very, very serious matter in Copyright law at this time. My recommendation is to avoid putting music on your website, in any shape or form, unless you have created it, have a license to it, or have bought it. The music industry is on the rampage in the court system today because Internet piracy has taken so much of its worldwide market in recent years. In fact, I wouldn’t even link to websites which appear to be offering music without having first obtained the appropriate Copyright ownership or license to it. Remember what happened to Napster users. Even high school kids ended up in court. Finally, I would include movies and television programs in this category. Stay away from using or linking to video footage of movies or television programs unless you are certain you have the right to use it. You don’t want Lady Gaga or MGM serving you with a $20,000,000 lawsuit claiming you caused them so much lost revenue.
The information contained herein is not legal advice and is subject to the following: DISCLAIMER.
About the Author: Pat Dickson is an 18 year attorney with JD, MBA, MSIM designations. He focuses in representing high tech and construction companies. He serves as counsel for Doodlebit, LLC. Visit his blog here: Pat Dickson - Your In House Attorney.
The very first thing I would do if you called me on the phone to ask me to assist you with marketing is Google your business name and check your page rank. If your business is very common or your name is not particularly unique I would give you the benefit of the doubt and perhaps add your city name or your metro area name to my search to help you out.
For example my husband’s business is called “Jeff of All Trades”. He has a handyman services and he uses DoodleKit so for purposes of this exercise he is pretty similar to other small businesses. So if I Google “Jeff of All Trades” here is the screen shot of results:
When my husband started his business we knew the URL www.jeffofalltrades.com was taken so we added our metro city “Kansas City” to the end and made his URL www.jeffofalltradeskc.com which has given us a bit of a handicap and we knew it going in. Even with that clutter my husband’s business occupies both the 3 and 4 spots in results on Google without the “KC” in the search criteria. This is what you want! You want to be in the first 5 spots of any Google search that is in your “keywords” so that you are on only on the first page of Google but no scrolling is required to find you!
How do you know what your keywords are?
Keywords are words that potential customers would search for when looking for your site. If you have had a Doodlekit site for a while you can see what your past search terms have been in your admin section. For my site SavvyB2Bmarketing.com you can see the common search terms for the last week on the Doodlekit, Admin, Statistics, Search Terms below.
You want to make sure you pepper these common search terms through your website both in the copy, tags on blog posts, picture tags, etc. The worst thing you can do is just leave your tags on your blog posts blank. You write a blog provide valuable content so that the post itself will help your website get found among the clutter. If you are a handyman in Kansas City like my husband every blog post he writes should have “Kansas City Handyman” as tags on the post. Let me show you why next.
On generic terms like “handyman Kansas City” the results on Google are not as encouraging as typing just a business name like “Jeff of All Trades”. Take a look at the screen shot below:
There are lots of people buying Google Ads for the words “handyman Kansas City” plus Google uses the “places” information from online Yellow Page type listings which favors those with a physical office location / store front. As you can see looking at the ads they are actually for services like Handyman Connection and Service Magic which a referral services that professionals can join to steer business their way. If you are just getting started and find this issue in your area or with your key words you might want to consider whether joining such an organization or buying a Google Ad word spot yourself might be a good idea. Each company / location situation is unique so do your homework first and see what your situation is before you spend money you don’t need to.
Thankfully my husband’s business gets most of his clients from referral and not from Google search. We find most people who use Google to search him out are actually past clients who have misplaced his business card or phone number and just need to get back in touch. Again every business if different and depending on whether you are just starting out or have an establish customer base will determine how much potential business you can win or lose from Google search placement.
Finally I want to say a word about links and content freshness. I am by no means an expert of Google’s search algorithms. I know what strategies work on the content creation and placement side to help your site be found by Google but the actual science of how it works is beyond my grasp. So I am going to link to a couple of blog posts by other writers who can help you out at tackling those issues.
- From The Daily SEO Blog - Freshness Factor: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings
- From Hubspot’s Blog – How Internal Linking helps your SEO
- From WebCentralMarketBlog - The Wrong Way to Build External Links for SEO
As a general rule links for your website and blog post should be just like referrals you would give to someone who shows up in your store or calls on the phone that you would refer a prospect to. For example my husband is frequently asked for the names of plumbers, electricians, general contractors who he knows and trusts. Since these are all associated businesses to his but not direct competitors he is always willing to give out the name of a trusted colleague. By the same token those are the businesses he should have on his blog role and listed in his resources section to build SEO.
Next month we will cover Landing Pages as a way to give key visitors a unique experience and thus improve their conversion!
About the Author: Heather Rubesch is currently the Director of Content for DemandCon, the only industry conference focused on accelerating the entire sales and marketing funnel. Her penchant for collaboration drew her 3 years ago to co-found the Savvy B2B Marketing blog with five of the most talented content marketers in the universe!
Last month I introduced you to the benefits of blogging and recapped the features of the Doodlekit blogging platform that is included with every Doodlekit site! This month we take blogging one step further with some practical how to’s for getting you starting.
But what do I write?
- For a few weeks write down every question a customer asks you. Separate list into questions from new customers verses existing customers.
- Does your business change seasonally? Do you offer different services in December than in June? If so make a list my month or season
- Is there legislation, regulation or licensing that affects your business / industry? If so write down those rules
- Is there anything innovative going on? New materials, new process, new equipment that older customers might not be up to speed on?
- Is your industry in the news? Set up some Google Alerts based on key words. A super quick blog post when you have no time is simply to post to journalistic news stories that are of interest to your customer base.
- Do you have some happy customers who are willing to do a case study or provide a testimonial?
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Why are you making changes to the FREE PLAN websites again?
Because of SPAM. We have done everything we could think of to keep our free plans open to the web. Unfortantely, spammers and their spam robots are abusing our free plan to produce thousands of spam website daily. The time and resources to fitler out these sites has been extensive and has now reached a point were we can no longer afford to support them the way they are.
Why are there now TWO types of free plans you can sign up for?
Effective immediately there will be two options to choose from when selecting a free plan:
1.) Use A Credit Card To VALIDATE Who You Are.
No charges will ever be applied to your card. We don't even store your credit card information. We only use it once to validate that your are a real person and (hopefully) not a spammer. The good news is that if you sign up this way, your website will be fully visible on the web and the old 'splash page' will be gone. This is the best way to enjoy our free website builder.
2.) Make A Private Website That Requires Logging In To View.
Only you will be able to see the website. You will need to login to view it (see image above). This will allow you to test out our free website builder and actually even build a full website. If you like it, you can choose to upgrade and make it public.
What if I already have a free website with Doodlekit?
If you already have a free website with us, you will be grandfathered in. No changes will apply except that the old Ad Splash Page will go away.
Will this finally stop spammers from creating spam websites?
No. But it will bring spam back to a more managable level. We will continue to monitor all our websites no matter which plan is used.
Doodlekit FREE PLAN websites will be down in protest for a 12 hour blackout on:
Wednesday, January 18th, from 8am–8pm EST
Doodlekit has joined an internet blackout protest with many other major internet companies to bring attention to the fact that Congress is trying to pass two well-intentioned (but deeply flawed) bills, the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran.
These laws would hold Internet Service Provider and Public Social Media websites (like Doodlekit, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc.) liable for all content posted by their users. This in effect would force us to remove all our FREE PLAN websites as we could get sued or shut down for content our users post that the government feels is a violation of these acts.
"Censorship begets censorship, and inherently defies oversight. SOPA is the wrong solution to any problem we might believe it would solve."
- Neil Stevens
Click Here for more information. Please Contact Your Congressman to help block these bills.
