If you have your own website, it’s probably full of writing, images and designs that you want to prevent other people from copying. Websites are particularly vulnerable to copying as people can simply highlight and copy text and pictures off the site. So what can you do to protect content on your website? Here, we’ll explain how Copyright Act protects websites. We’ll also set out some steps you can take to deter people from infringing your copyright in your website.
What can be protected?
The Copyright Act doesn’t provide a broad protection for websites. However, it does provide protection to certain types of ‘works’, such as literary, artistic, musical and cinematographic works. This means that while there are no protections for a website as a whole, parts of it can be protected. These include:
- Written text (blog posts, articles etc)
- Visual content (photos, graphics, illustrations etc)
- Audio (music, podcasts, recordings etc)
- Video (vlogs, animations etc)
The Copyright Act protects only “substantial parts” of each of these works. What constitutes a “substantial part” is assessed on a qualitative and quantitative basis. This means that if a person has copied only a small, insignificant section of a blog post or an image, then that part won’t be protected by copyright.
Notably, copyright protection subsists in a work as soon as it is created. This means that there is no need to ‘register’ the copyright, unlike a trademark.
Exceptions
The Copyright Act allows some materials to be copied without permission through the fair dealing exception. Under this exception, people are allowed to copy materials under certain conditions for particular purposes. These purposes include using the material for the purposes of research or study, criticism, parody and reporting news. So if it seems like a person copied content off your website for these purposes, you probably won’t be able claim copyright infringement.
Who owns the copyright?
If a person has copied content from your website, you can only claim copyright infringement if you own the copyright in that content. Whether you have copyright in the content depends on the circumstances.
For example, say you have created the work yourself, such as a blog post you’ve written or a photo you took. In this case, you will be the owner of the copyright over that work.
Alternatively, say you’ve used content from third parties, such as a video on Youtube or an image from Google Images. If you have, you should get permission from the maker of those contents before using them on your website. The copyright will usually remain with the maker of that content, unless you come to an agreement with the maker to have the copyright assigned to you.
Furthermore, you may have hired a website designer to create your website for you. In this case, you should look at the contract between you and the website designer to see who owns the copyright in the website design. If there is no agreement, you should negotiate with the designer regarding who owns the copyright. If you want to prevent the designer creating similar designs for your competitors, you may wish to have the copyright over the website assigned exclusively to you.
What you can do when someone copies content off your website?
Take legal action
If you discover that someone has copied content from your website in which you own the copyright, you may begin by contacting them and asking them to take down the material. If they refuse to do so, you may take legal action against them. Your lawyer may send a cease and desist letter which may include a claim for compensation for infringing your copyright.
Copyright notice
It’s often impractical and costly to seek legal help every time someone copies content from your website. Furthermore, people visiting your website may copy content without knowing that they’re infringing copyright. Accordingly, you can take some measures to inform visitors about what they can and cannot do with the content on your website. You could also make it harder for people to copy your material.
Some suggestions by the Australian Copyright Council include:
- Having a “copyright notice” on the website. This can clearly state what visitors can and cannot do, and the consequences for infringing copyright
- Watermarking images
- Preventing some content from being downloaded (e.g. allowing videos to be streamed only, not downloadable)
Conclusion
Your website may be full of content which people can easily copy. While the Copyright Act doesn’t protect a website as a whole, it still provides copyright protection to a lot of these materials. If you are the copyright owner of content on your website, you may assert these rights if someone copies them. While it may be impossible to completely prevent people from copying, steps such as putting up a copyright notice on your site can deter people from copying.
