Copyright protection can be provided for people who have unique content or products that can be stolen or used illegally by others. In this case, it is important for us to have evidence on things that we have created in the past. In this case, we will be able to survive a dispute related to who own the actual copyright of our digital creation. In some cases, a third party could claim that we have copied their previous works. In this case, it is important for each detail of the draft is marked with date and time stamp. This would be helpful when we want to prove the ownership of copyrighted work. In this case, websites are often created from scratch and we should be able to provide evidences that we are in the actual development process. During a dispute with the 3rd party, it would be quite difficult for people to assume that we don’t have copyrighted property of the website. In fact, to prevent future disputes; it is better to place a copyright notice somewhere in the website to indicate our ownership.
The copyright notice should be very clear. As an example, we should tell to others that all elements that the website is copyrighted, including graphics design, images, pictures, text, ideas and others. All drafts and revisions should also be recorded, so we will be able to prove that we are working with the website, since the beginning. We should be able to do this easily, if we can show at what date we are working on the website. There are content, sources codes, databases, pictures and other things that can be protected. We need to re-read the copyright notice to make sure that all parts of our websites, including its intangible idea is protected. When we need to go to court, we will be able to proof our ownership. Problems can happen during a dispute with co-creator, who may had more limited involvement in the project, but thinks that he should get similar ownership of the website. There could be 3rd parties who cast doubt upon the credibility of our evidences, so we may also need to have witnesses that corroborate our claim, such as co-workers, co-owners and employees.
We should know that someone else can claim the ownership of the website if they had significant involvement in the whole project. In this case, we may need to negotiate, instead of bringing the whole matter to the court. If full settlements can’t be achieved, at least we should be able to find agreements on most of the parts. In any case, we shouldn’t be found liable for any kind of copyright infringement. It should be important that we have fair dealings and fair uses about the whole concept. However, we should be aware that the whole thing can be more complicated, if someone uses our idea, but he says that he sub-consciously adopts it, instead of taking it from us. In this case, we should be aware of the common limitations of theft or pure creativity.