It's product promotion time and your office needs you to put together some snazzy brochure that gets the point across about how great your product is. Your boss wants it to be a real glossy affair with lots of interesting eye-catching pictures that can be sent out to customers and posted on your equally snazzy web-site.
With no marketing department and a looming deadline – you clear your desk and off you set surfing the World Wide Web for ideas. Thus far, this familiar story is okay, however it is at this point that so many get stuck and follow the wrong path, leading their company along the road to infringement proceedings!
Let's face it – if we were all able to put together great ideas and snazzy brochures we would be in advertising – would we not? So what do we do – we look for examples to give us inspiration – but we wouldn't dream of copying a passage from the latest Harry Potter® novel or use a photograph of Britney Spears or use drawings of Tigger® or Pooh® to demonstrate how your product works. All in safe hands so far, but when we surf the World Wide Web we are swamped with text, pictures, colours and designs – how do you know that you will have permission to use that piece of exciting text or that wonderful photograph of a blob of ice cream falling off a cone or the one where the frog is caught just at the point it enters the glass of water that just happens to be around when it decides to jump? The simple answer is that you probably don't have and this is where the story turns sour and becomes all too familiar.
And now for the legal bit.....
Copyright exists in many forms and arises automatically - including literary works (even those with little artistic merit – such as this e-update), photographs, and graphics and so on. Trade Marks will also exist in a symbol or slogan – even in some of the colours you like!
No matter how large or small your business is, if you have infringed someone's copyright or trade mark this could result in costs to your business. Many content providers today have teams set up just to surf the World Wide Web to catch copyright infringers out and when they do they sue.
So before putting together any promotional or sales materials, or for that matter any materials, make sure you have permission to use the works that you want to copy or better still why not write your own text and take your own photographs and then you will know the copyright position.
Disclaimer
The material contained in this article is of the nature of general comment only and does not give advice on any particular matter. Recipients should not act on the basis of the information in this e-update without taking appropriate professional advice upon their own particular circumstances.
