Whether you are an artist or a crafter, or you are a published author or an inspired poet, if you are sharing your intellectual property online you may want to be doing a few things to protect it. Nothing could be more heartbreaking than having someone steal your work. You don’t have to hide your work in order to keep someone from stealing it though.
It’s about more than just making sure you let people know it’s your intellectual property though. Even files can get damaged and corrupted by hackers if your computer isn’t safe. Here are a few easy ways you can work harder to protect your artistic and creative endeavors. There’s no sense in letting someone else take credit for something you put your heart into!
Make Sure You Have A Secure Server
Passwords, encryptions, and virus protection are all excellent things that you should be utilizing even on home computers. If a hacker can steal your credit card information or your Facebook password, you can bet they can find a backdoor into that million dollar manuscript.
Not only do you want things to be secure, you should be keeping backup discs, or at least putting your important files on a thumb drive so that if your computer does get corrupted you won’t lose anything important.
Copyright Your Property
Take the necessary step to copyright your work. That could be as simple as putting your name or business name with the copyright symbol on a photo, or actually going through the copyright office to register your work, which can cost money but gives you extra protection.
Once you’ve published a book, it is protected. Most items, like photos, are safe with the copyright symbol. There are different ways to copyright art and even music. If you are an artist of any kind, take time to research all the ways you can protect your craft.
Put Your Name On It
If you post your own videos on YouTube, like Park West Gallery does, you can also benefit from the copyright symbol. That should be followed by your name or the name of your business, or even a pen name. Putting your name on your intellectual property is one good way to protect it.
You can also set up a Google alert for your name or business name, and anytime someone reposts your work you’ll get notified. They shouldn’t be doing this without your permission, so this will give you a heads up and you can reach out and ask them to take it down.
You put a lot of work into your art, you don’t have to let other people use it for free, or steal it, if you don’t want to. Make sure it’s safe!