copyright?

[Terrier_Jimlad]

hi there,

just starting my own online community, and it has a lot of my own artwork on there, and i was wondering how i go about properly copyrighting the online material? I know i can just put © 2009 Copyright MyName but surely that doesnt cover it in a court of law or legal argument etc?

Anyone got an idea?

 

[Irish_Tom]

Pretty much as long as you can prove you made it/drew it/took it then you're covered with a © on your site.

There's not a lot you can do to stop someone from stealing one of your images if you put it online but you can nail them should you ever catch them. There are a few things which you can do to dissuade people - use a watermark - make the images low-res so they can't be re-printed that kind of thing.

As far as being covered in court - like i said - if you can prove that you were the first to make it/own it then you should have a fairly strong case. For instance - if you own the working file, RAW photo or the 300dpi PSD file with layers. These kind of things are usually hard to come by unless you are the author - even better if you can prove the 'first created on date' as it will usually pre-date the .jpeg that the other party has stolen.

It's a risk you have to take if you want to put your work out there but I think the benefits outweigh the risk.

Panzer

 

[unwashed potato!]

while this thread is here, whats the deal with copying forums? like say i made my own forum and nicked whole threads (i know this would be very time consuming) to make my forum appear like a used place. whats the deal on this?

i'm not actually going to do this but i have ideas for things which i can't explain and would hopefully make me not sound like a bad person like the above may have but obviously want to keep the ideas to myself for now, but they are similiar to what i asked above.

 

[JIM_BOB7813]

while this thread is here, whats the deal with copying forums? like say i made my own forum and nicked whole threads (i know this would be very time consuming) to make my forum appear like a used place. whats the deal on this?

i'm not actually going to do this but i have ideas for things which i can't explain and would hopefully make me not sound like a bad person like the above may have but obviously want to keep the ideas to myself for now, but they are similiar to what i asked above.

Forum is the same as a website (AFAIK), so if you copied the content without permission, then it's against copyright regulations.
As for who owns the copyright, I believe the user that posted it does (but gives a license to the forum host to use it?)

You can buy forum databases from sites like digitalpoint if you want to kick-start a forum, although I have no idea how good they are, or how legal they are with respect to copyright. There's also a copyright section at DP, might be worth asking there.

 

[TwoSaints]

Upload your images to a 3rd party website (complete with watermarks) like Flickr or deviantART, where they will then have a record of uploading it (which you can then refer to should you need to prove you were the original owner of the image. I am sure you can then make it private so nobody can view your images there (reducing the risk of them being stolen/taking hits away from your website).