Legal and ethical issues in Web Design

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS:

Wikipedia’s defines intellectual property (or “IP”) as “a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, and primarily encompasses copyrights, patents, and trademarks.

It also includes other types of rights, such as: trade secrets, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unfair competition. Artistic works like music and literature, as well as some discoveries, inventions, words, phrases, symbols, and designs can all be protected as intellectual property.”

In the digital world of design we’ll be dealing with a lot of these rights and we should be able to recongnize and manage them as they will protect our work and keep us out of trouble when it comes to legal issues.

The most common rights we come along are:

COPYRIGHT: a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution, usually only for a limited time.

-The exclusive rights are not absolute, but limited by limitations and excemptions to copyright law, including fair use.

-Copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas themselves.

What does the copyright do for me as a digital designer?

The answer is very simple: copyright protects your work and stops others from using it (copying, distributing copies-whether free of charge or for sale, renting or lending copies of your work, putting it on the internet) without your permission. Any original creation such as illustration, photography, original literary non-written work, software, webcontent, database related to your work is automatically copyrighted and can be marked with copyright symbol (©), your name and the year of creation. But even if there is no mark, the rights are still in place.

The same principle applies vice versa meaning that you can not copy or use copyright material without permission. You may, however, contact a copyright owner and ask for permission, agree a licence with the owner to use it, buy or acquire the copyright, confirm that your intended use falls within the exceptions to copyright.

It is also very important for a digital designer to understand the concept of “work of hire” as under employment, an employee’s work will be owned by the employer and as under free lancing (self employment) the work is exclusively owned by the free lancer unless otherwise stipulated in the contract.

TRADEMARKS: a recognizable sign, design, or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others,

-Trademarks used to identify services are usually called service marks;

-The trademark owner can be an individual, business organization, or any legal entity.

-A trademark may be located on a package, a label, a voucher or on the product itself. For the sake of corporate identity trademarks are often displayed on company buildings.

The symbol for trademark accordingly to Wikipedia are:

™ (the “trademark symbol“, which is the letters “TM” in superscript, for an unregistered trademark, a mark used to promote or brand goods)

℠ (which is the letters “SM” in superscript, for an unregistered service mark, a mark used to promote or brand services)

® (the letter “R” surrounded by a circle, for a registered trademark).

IPO — how to search for a trade mark in the UK & EU

CREATIVE COMMONS:

“Helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world.” (https://creativecommons.org/about/)

Under the CC (Creative Commons), as the owners warn in their note, we should not assume that everything showing up in the results (Media, Music, Images, Video orWeb) is automatically under CC license. After displaying the results accordingly to our choices, we should always follow the link to the image source to find more information about what we’re looking for. Here’s an example of how it’s done:

VisitPage — Click on Visit page for more info are there is clearily information on the right side of the screen stating that the image may be subject to copyright

InfoReusing

InformReusing — All the information about the mage

If you can not find the copyright information for an image we should NOT USE IT. We need to be sure we have the right permission and license for an image before we use it, therefore the safest option is to use a stock image library or an own image.

Permissions with CC license:

-attribution: if I’m using someone’s work in any way I must give credit the way the owner requests, but not in a way that suggests they endorse me or the use of their work. If I want to use someone’s work without giving the owner credit or for endorsement purposes, I myst must get your permission first.

-sharealike: I can copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify the owner’s work, as long as I distribute any modified work on the same terms. If I want to distribute modified works under other terms, I must get the owner’s permission first.

-non comercial: I can copy, distribute, display, perform, and (unless the owner has has chosen NoDerivatives) modify and use the owner’s work for any purpose other than commercially unless I get the owner’s permission first.

-non derivatives: I can copy, distribute, display and perform only original copies of the owner’s work. If I want to modify the work, I must get the owner’s permission first.

GOOGLE-how to perform an ethical search?