Protect yourself against design thieves
by Sergio Ordonez at 8:40 am on Freelancing
Lately we have been discovering a lot of websites that steal designs from SOSFactory, they are mainly websites dedicated to porn or warez, and as they are illegal activities it looks like it’ll be hard to make them remove our designs. In this post we’ll try to make stealing difficult for bad boys.
But don’t think this only happens to newbies, Britney Spears plagiarizes designs under the protection of the famous cosmetics trademark Elizabeth Arden.
If you want to read more about this case click on the images.
As you can see, plagiarism is something that appears in every level, in our case we have to be realists, in normal conditions no business would risk to plagiarize because it’d be cheaper to buy us the design than the possible consecuences. The ones that steal our designs are more of the porn website style, warez and things like that.
How do we protect our images?
INTELECTUAL PROPERTY REGISTRATION
The first thing you have to do is register your designs in the intelectual property registry offices (if you live outside of Spain go to the culture ministry of your country), if the design is by order your client has to do this, it’ll probably ask you to sign a contract where you give him the rights over the design. You can give them all the rights, only reproduction rights, rights for a specific use… you’ll have to negociate that; if you’re starting, you’ll probably have to give them all the rights.
Design registration is something very simple, you only have to take the designs to the offices (take printed copies) and pay some fees. There’s a little trick to pay less fees, if for example you want to register 30 characters, take them all together, and say for example that are characters of your comic, that way you pay only once instead of 30. If they are for stories, well, say it’s for a story.
There’s something i’ll clarify, the law (at least Spain law) protects the design since it’s creation, this means that just because of being it’s author, only you have rights over it, EVEN IF IT’S NOT REGISTERED, although registering it works as a document to prove that you’re the author in case of plagiarism… otherwise, you’ll have to figure out how to prove you’re the author.
AVOID PORTFOLIO IMAGES FROM BEING STOLEN
About this topic there are thousands of websites and the conclusion is that a perfect method doesn’t exist, all of them have advantages and disadvantages, although we will make it harder for them to steal them:
- Using Flash: create a Flash movie where you put the images, they wont be able to download them directly, but they can always take a screenshot and edit it with Photoshop. Besides, you need to work a lot for this.
- Using Watermarks: it’s extra work, and the designs don’t look the same. It’s one of the most effective methods, but it gives an amateur air to our work that i personally don’t like.
- Javascript, deactivating the right click, various tricks: The same as the rest, with a screenshot they can steal it anyway.
Some advices to minimize damages:
- Never show high resolution images, use only JPG format with 60% quality, that way at least they can’t print in good quality.
- Put in your images a legend like copyright by …. the use without written authorization is prohibited. More than one steals designs only because they’re ignorants.
- Put your website link in all your designs, this way you’ll give some more work to the bad boy… it also works as publicity, you never know where those designs will be.
- Put your designs in complex backgrounds, so it’ll be harder to erase.
WHAT TO DO WHEN THE IMAGE HAS BEEN STOLEN
As i said before, never show high resolution images, this way our desings will rarely be printed… but we still have internet plagiarism.
If we design by order and we give them all the righs over the design this work should be done by the client, but it’s never bad to be concerned about the interests of who feeds us… this will also help in letting us show the work in our portfolio.
Identify the offender
The first thing we have to do is identify the one who is stealing the designs from us. This is why the WHOIS exists, it’s a registry where we can see information about any website. You only have to write the domain name (ie: www.sosnewbie.com) and it will show you the registry information.
The WHOIS RECORD results will tell us who is the owner, it’s contact email and address, and the most important, it’s DOMAIN NAME SERVERS. This gives us information about the business that is hosting them, in my case is downtownhost.
Contact the offender
We contact him via email, letting him know gently that he’s commiting a felony to the intelectual property, that we’re the owners of those designs and we have proof of it (high resolution files, sketchs…) and that if he doesn’t remove those designs we will notify their hosting business to do the necesary actions (ie: erase their hosting account).
If the offender removes the design it’s perfect, mission accomplished. In most of the cases it’s what happens.
Contact the hosting business
If he doesn’t remove it or there are problems regarding the image property, we will procede to contact their hosting which will answer with an email informing us about the procedure to see if what we are saying it’s true.
If everything goes well, in a short while the website will go down… which doesn’t mean that 20 more sites will appear the next day :S
Let’s clarify that using this method the process may be long and hard depending on the quality of the fraud prevention system of the hosting, because we need to collect proofs and send them, so it’s better to always try to resolve the issue directly with the offender. Imagine that as the case of SOSFactory there are hundreds of them.
Contact our client
In the unlikely case that the hosting business is in favor of the offender, all we got is to inform our client what happened to take the necesary measures against the offender and his hosting… in case he considers it appropiate.
CONCLUSION: we can lose a lot with small offenders, in the best of the cases it’ll be a task that demands a lot of time and effort.
There is no perfectly effective method (correct me if i’m wrong), in the best of the cases it will demand extra time and we will only make their work of stealing a little harder.
Let’s take it as the price of success 
