Brian Hall: This is attorney Brian Hall with Traverse Legal, PLC., a law firm representing Internet companies throughout the world. Today, I will be answering the question: who owns content on a website? Now, this question has multiple parts to it. So, let's define each aspect.
The first deals with content, and what is content? Content could mean many things. It could mean the words that someone sees on a website. It could mean images or photographs, it could mean videos, it could mean other things that are present on a website.
The second part is, what is a website? A website is obviously what you arrive at when you type a domain name into the URL browser. So, who owns content on a website? The easiest way to answer that question is to look at the terms of use, or terms of service that are on a particular website. The terms of use are one type of website agreement, that typically details who owns the particular content on a website. It even goes into who owns intellectual property associated with that website, and that intellectual property can be a trademark, copyright, patent, trade secret, or other type of non-tangible or real property.
Recent Comments