Websites are an important aspect of online presence, and for some they are a powerful tool for sales, promotion, providing service, and even communicating with their users. So, it’s needless to say that a lot of time and effort goes into creating a quality website. As a result, it’s perfectly normal if you want to protect your creation. However, this can be quite complicated, since each website has lots of individual elements. So, if you ever wondered what you can do to protect your website, then stick around, here we will be discussing the issue of copyrighting web pages.
Trademark vs Copyright
Before we talk about the things you can do, let’s discuss the difference between copyright and trademark.
Copyrights can be applied to certain pieces of work, like videos, photos, or blog posts. In other words, any original text on your site, or similar content can be protected using copyright law. Once your work goes public, the law also becomes active and your work is protected. But it’s easier to protect your work if you have registered copyright.
Trademarks can be applied to symbols or elements that denote your products and/or services. So, you can trademark your logo or company name. Nobody can use your trademark without permission, but you also need to register it.
Reasons to Copyright Your Website
If you are working on your brand awareness, and don’t want people who are scammers to take advantage of your company name and logo you need to register copyright and trademark, in order to protect it. It also prevents others from piggybacking off of your success and impersonating you when providing their services.
How to Copyright and Trademark Your Website
If you live in the US where they have strong and well-established copyright laws, then you don’t need to worry about this too much. Anything you create that is original is automatically protected. So even if you didn’t register your content, you can send cease and desist orders to anyone trying to copy your work.
If you wish to register your work, then you can do so online, by going to relevant sites. It will probably cost between 30 and 50 dollars. You don’t have to do this every time you create a new blog post, it’s enough to do this once or twice every year.
If you wish to get trademarks, you will have to go through the trademark database and see if what you have isn’t too similar to someone else’s trademark that is already protected. If everything is clear, you simply submit the content that needs to be trademarked and wait until your application is processed.