To deploy any strategy that is defined as professional content marketing , therefore, there is a meticulous work and a dedication that goes beyond writing posts and describing services : planning, keyword studies, the interests and habits of the ideal user, promotions on social networks and search engines... A job to be proud of and also to protect.
The online environment has brought significant advantages to the world of marketing, but it has also made not only visible but also accessible a huge amount of content that is often exposed to being used by third parties and, in the worst cases, passed off as proprietary when it is not.
To protect all this work, all those hours behind a blog post, a description, a copy… copyright acts as a “digital lawyer”, but how can we enforce it? How can I legally protect my web content through copyright? It is crucial to consider the legal aspects when advertising a service , ensuring that all content used is properly protected and authorized.
Table of Contents
Signs to distinguish between legal content use and illegal content use
Copyright and protection of own content on the Internet
Recognition of explicit rights on the Internet
Limitations on intellectual property
Signs to distinguish between legal content use and illegal content use
When it comes to addressing the rights and obligations we have in the creation of content, before discussing fair use, we must remember almost as a religion that not everything goes on the Internet . Therefore, if in doubt about the legality of any content we are going to share, display or modify, it is best to always look for legal alternatives.
This is the case, for example, of the use of images for commercial use. When carrying out a business activity, even if the purpose is not to obtain economic profit from its use, we cannot take any image from the Internet and incorporate it into our social media profile as a post, blog, email, etc.
Therefore, if we do not know the source that can indicate the legality of its use or we do not have the appropriate permissions, the most sensible thing is to use images that are subject to free and consented use.
But this is not the only legal and moral conflict that we can find when creating content... Where is the limit between plagiarism and citation when we talk about loose paragraphs? Is the content I create protected against unauthorized use by third parties? What do Google, Facebook and the main web content management platforms think about all these legal aspects?
Copyright and protection of own content on the Internet
There is a certain debate about the exposure of own content on the Internet and that not even companies themselves know how to resolve and answer accurately: Is our own content, created from start to finish by us, in the public domain by virtue of being exposed on the Internet or is it automatically protected by intellectual property rights ?
Before entering into the debate or the subject, let us refer to what the law dictates so as not to leave any doubts about it:
“The intellectual property of a literary, artistic or scientific work belongs to the author by the sole fact of its creation.”
This extract from Royal Legislative general manager email lists Decree 1/1996, of April 12, approving the Revised Text of the Intellectual Property Law (LPI), is quite enlightening in this regard: unless we state otherwise, no one can misappropriate our creations , and the management and timely treatment of each one of them remains in our hands, be it a text, an entire ebook or even a simple tweet.
This piece of legislation also clarifies another question that causes doubt among creators of content on the Internet: should I register my work in the intellectual property registry? The answer is no.
It can be done, but we will not be prohibiting its dissemination without consent, since, as we have seen, that is prohibited in itself. What we will be doing is protecting them, offering means of protection and implicit proof that by disseminating that content they are breaking the law.
For practical and legal purposes, the content created and owned by GO2JUMP is equally protected by the GO2JUMP signature as by the GO2JUMP© signature.
To give you a practical idea of how this law works, copyright is like the rights that protect our house from theft and intrusion by people outside our environment: should we have an alarm or a sign that expressly prohibits entry to anyone who does not have our permission? The simple fact that someone enters our property already constitutes a crime: whether we have an alarm or not simply reinforces security so that whoever is tempted to enter does not do so, but if they decide to do so they will be punished anyway.
Recognition of explicit rights on the Internet
Normally, in one way or another, we will try (or should try) to protect the content that is our property in some way additional to that granted to us by law by Intellectual Property. Thus, in addition to the legal conditions of the page, we can make use of and detect certain legal and illegal symbols that indicate the degree of protection of the work. These are the famous Copyright, Copyleft and Creative Commons:
Copyright : This is the best known and leaves no room for doubt. Any work marked with copyright reserves all rights of exploitation, so in order to distribute or use it we must ask for permission and receive it explicitly from the creator of the work.
Copyleft : without legal recognition, it emerged as a response to the need for an internet where creative works can flow without limits or barriers. However, it is full of "buts" and conditions, which each author under this banner is responsible for indicating through an explanatory text. Without this text, the work can be distributed and used as long as the source that created it is mentioned. It also allows its modification, but in this case it maintains the original authorship.
Creative Commons : these are free licenses that include all the "buts" that we mentioned in the case of Copyleft. Thus, the author can freely decide whether his work is in the public domain, whether it can be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes, whether it can be modified or whether the original authorship must be maintained.
Limitations on intellectual property
So… does all my content have to be original? Can I use other people’s fragments within an original work? There are certain limitations within the assumptions set out by the LPI that would allow us to make correct use of other people’s works as long as the following requirements are fully met:
The cited work must have been disclosed: the entire work from which we have obtained the fragment must be accessible to anyone who requires it. Therefore, it must not be an unpublished work and must have been published by some means.
Its use must be for teaching or research purposes: if it is of interest to the common good of society, as is the case for teaching or research, we can borrow other people's content. For other activities, whether economic or not, we cannot do so without explicit permission.
Its use must be justified in the context of the work: the purpose of this requirement is to protect the nature of the work, so that it is not perverted by inappropriate use. Thus, we cannot contextualize a poem within a scientific study simply because we want to attract attention or use the author's good name.
The source and author of the work must be indicated: a “sine qua non” condition. We must always indicate where the work comes from and who made it, as well as marking exactly which fragment it corresponds to so that the viewer has no doubts about who each part belongs to.
Ultimately, what copyright is all about and why I am interested in protecting my content on the Internet is not just a matter of seeing recognition for work that, if done well, requires hours and hours of strategy and knowledge of the online environment, but also making the Internet a reliable environment and reducing bad practices that lead users to distrust what is offered to them.
