Matt: Hi, and welcome back to Copyright Law Radio! I'm Matt Plessner. The laws of copyrighting and theft on the internet can be very undefined sometimes. The internet is a medium that's still very young, and thus can be subject to, I guess, kaleidoscope of different legal issues. We've referred to the internet as the "wild, wild west" in many of the interviews past, and that is very true. One such issue is intellectual property theft. Today, we're going to be discussing what this means, as well as some preventive and recovery methods. And of course, at Traverse Legal, we work with COPYSHIELD.COM which is a site that helps with matters such as these. And to help us with these we are welcoming Copyshields's very own Justin Mikula. Justin, we appreciate you taking some time to talk with us today.
Justin: Thanks for having me.
Matt: Now Justin....Well, for those people who haven't heard, I guess, our other interviews, can you just give us a little brief overview of Copyshield and what you do exactly?
Matt: Well, that sounds like a very good idea, and of course, good stuff to help out. What exactly is intellectual property? What does that encompass?
Justin: Intellectual property is a creation of the mind for which exclusive rights are recognized. This is generally with regards to the internet-intangible assets such as music or images or even blog posts or articles and things like that.
Matt: And so, of course, that includes not just the website itself, but all the media forms. You've mentioned, of course, music, pictures, and script and stuff like that. Isn't that right?
Justin: Correct. It can also include the look and feel of individual websites and things like that.
Matt: Well, sounds good. And intellectual property theft is kind of the key term today. How does this usually occur, would you say, Justin?
Justin: By in large, from the data that we have collected at Copyshield, the number one form intellectual property theft would be simply taking images of the sites. And the second, which is much
lesser in percentage of occurrence, would be taking copy from the sites, such as articles and texts and things like that.
Matt: So then, how does Copyshield help to prevent, and of course recover later, this intellectual property theft? In other words, basically, what does it do to help out the situation?
Justin: Well, there is not one way to prevent intellectual property theft. So what Copyshield tries to do is order a suite of tools to sort of limit and diminish the ways that people can take content from your website without there being a record of doing so. So the biggest tool that we have it disabling certain common methods for taking this content off of websites. It can be as simple as disabling right clicks, so they are not able to right click on an image and save it from there. Most browsers also support dragging the image off of the website onto the desktop, and that is also disabled. In addition to that, most of the most useful parts of Copyshield include monitoring and recording information about the people who are attempting to take intellectual content from these sites.
Matt: And of course, I've come across a lot of pictures on the internet that have the watermarks on them (the "photography by...internet name here"). This obviously helps a lot? Or are there other things people should do to protect themselves from having these pictures stolen?
Justin: Well, that's certainly a good way to start. Unfortunately, the only way to recover these images is manually find them or incidentally find them on another persons site or being used by someone else, recognizing the copyright, or excuse me, the watermark and then pursuing legal remedies or trying to contact the person and nicely requesting that they take it down. This takes a fair amount of effort and diligence on the owner’s part, and I don't believe it is the best solution for that.
Matt: Are these some of the most common things taken or lifted, I guess, from a website are pictures, or are there even more common things like music and stuff like that? Are there equal problems with these?
Justin: Unfortunately, we don't really handle things involving music and that type of intellectual property. So I, just offhand, would imagine that music piracy is probably one of the greatest concerns of the modern internet.
Matt: Alright, well Justin, as I said before, thanks again for help on this matter, and of course, we always appreciate you being with us, and of course, everything you do to help out with the Traverse
Legal office.
Justin: Thank you.
Matt: And this is Matt Plessner, for Copyright Law Radio.
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