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Copyright
When you make a really cool animated GIF or make up some text that could be really useful you don't want it copied or reproduced without your permission, with someone else taking the credit, right? ok, so that's where copyright comes in.
Copyright comes in two flavours: the official, registered one, and the unofficial. The oficial one is the one large corporations use when they have a trademark or something else that is very important, like the Windows 95 logo for Microsoft. For this type of copyright you must register with the American Patents Office (well, OK, it's called something like that!), which takes quite a long time and costs you a small fee. Fair enough, so this kind of copyright is pretty useless for people like me who write stuff like this who, firstly, haven't got any money to spare, and haven't got the time to arrange it. You might now think, then why has he got Copyright notices all over his page then? Well, that's what I call the unofficial copyright. You can put a notice like that on any page or image and no-one is allowed to copy it. Simple as that. The only reasons for registering you might have are that you can probably file a large lawsuit against anyone who uses or copies your stuff without permission, which, for most stuff on web pages, isn't really worth it, from my point of view!
All you have to do to make sure some surfer out there doesn't take your stuff is put a copyright notice in your page(s). This can either be on every page (like I have done), or on the very first page, saying that everything in the site is copyrighted. Personally, I think that putting it on every page is best, as people can enter your site in any way, and not necessarily through the main/first page...
Copyright notices should say something like:
All material Copyright 1998 your name. All Rights Reserved.
It's also a good idea to make another page with further legal stuff, basically expanding on the copyright policy and telling people they aren't allowed to sue you for anything that goes wrong with anything...! Take a look at mine.
Well, basically, that's it, I'm not a lawyer! *laugh*. |
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