Kelly Crigger's Blog - Posts Tagged "copyright-law"
Protect Your Product
This article first ran in Vetrepreneur Magazine in November, 2015 and is reprinted here with permission.
Everyone has a routine. I wake up every morning and check about ten websites that I like including my own facebook author page. One day a fan asked a question; “Hey Crigger, didn’t you say this once?” and posted a link to an obscure website that had copied one of my articles nearly word for word and claimed it as their own. Pissed doesn’t begin to describe my attitude as I strangled my Mickey Mouse coffee mug. I sent a letter describing my pissed-offedness that may or may not have ended with the words, “I’ll stab you in the face!” The article was removed immediately.
This incident taught me a valuable lesson: the more creative you are the more you have to protect your creativity. Businesses copying the truly creative people of the world and profiting from that work as if it were their own is a disgusting trend in the business world. Anything and everything that can be copied will be, right down to a comedian’s jokes. If you google Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia, you can find a harsh video of Rogan confronting Mencia about word for word comedy plagiarism.
“The digital age brings content to your doorstep in the blink of an eye and when combined with unscrupulous people it creates a situation where copying someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is too easy,” says Ranger Up CEO Nick Palmisciano. Ranger Up is a mid-sized business that makes military and patriotic apparel, but its success has had a downside: its profitable designs put it in the crosshairs of rival companies who don’t have a moral objection to copyright infringement. The blatant illegal activity keeps Palmisciano on his toes to find and expose copycats. “On average, we send four Cease and Desist letters a week. We have to protect our intellectual property or we have nothing left. Are we copied less than some other similar sized brands? Yes because people know we will move on them when they steal from us.”
Ranger Up’s experiences usually end well once the violator has been identified, but not every case does. Many times the offended party never finds out they’ve been copied or once they do, they don’t have the knowledge, time, or resources to take action. In this digital age the likelihood of getting caught is much higher, but the risk of someone taking action is actually lower. There’s no incentive to not copy someone else’s stuff when the worst you can do is tell them to stop or call them out publicly, which has little to no effect.
“We don’t really have the resources to go after all the copycats,” says Tiffany Oden, owner of the small boutique business, Quinn’s Closet, which operates solely on web-based platforms like Etsy and Facebook. “I catch people copying our dresses long after I’ve made and sold them, but what can I do? I’m a two-person operation.”
You can do a lot actually. If you run a web-based business then the first thing you can do is contact the sales platform about the infringement. “Website providers have mechanisms in place to protect intellectual property that most companies don’t know about,” says Trevor Schmidt of Hutchison PLLC in Raleigh , NC. This low cost mechanism should be the first step in protecting your product. Every platform from Etsy to Facebook has a copyright infringement clause in their terms of service so if you can demonstrate that another business is stealing your property they have the obligation of taking it down.
Step two in the escalation process is to reach out to the offending company personally. “A lot of people have success reaching out to the business owner,” Schmidt says. “Initial contact is frequently effective before getting an attorney involved. If two owners can come to an arrangement and come to a business solution that benefits both sides then that’s the best way to deal with the problem.”
If that doesn’t work then it’s time to call in the people with law degrees, like Schmidt, which usually involves a couple of official letters. The first letter informs the offending party that you, the victim, are under counsel and intend to take legal action, which can also be categorized as a cease and desist letter. The second letter will either address any counterpoints the other side made or ratchet up the pressure to ensure the infringer knows you are serious, and the third is a court summons, but it rarely comes to that, according to Schmidt. “There’s little to be gained for either party in going to court unless there is a lot of money at stake.”
In the case of trademark infringement, a company can file a UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) complaint to object to the registration of a domain name. But be warned…none of these actions prevent the offender from offending again. Businesses who rely on intellectual property must be ever vigilant to ward off the thieves and frequently it’s a game of whack-a-mole, as Palmisciano has learned over the years.
“As bad as these pieces of lowlife scum are, the more damaging thievery comes from rival brands that take successful design concepts and modify them just enough to avoid litigation,” he says. “The most frustrating thing in this business is watching creative people put out great products that they worked hard on, and then seeing uncreative remoras tweak those ideas and call them their own. It’s unearned success, but such is life.”
Everyone has a routine. For some people that routine is to get up and see what they can steal from the creative people of the world and get away with it. Those creative people need to make action part of their routine and not let it happen.
Everyone has a routine. I wake up every morning and check about ten websites that I like including my own facebook author page. One day a fan asked a question; “Hey Crigger, didn’t you say this once?” and posted a link to an obscure website that had copied one of my articles nearly word for word and claimed it as their own. Pissed doesn’t begin to describe my attitude as I strangled my Mickey Mouse coffee mug. I sent a letter describing my pissed-offedness that may or may not have ended with the words, “I’ll stab you in the face!” The article was removed immediately.
This incident taught me a valuable lesson: the more creative you are the more you have to protect your creativity. Businesses copying the truly creative people of the world and profiting from that work as if it were their own is a disgusting trend in the business world. Anything and everything that can be copied will be, right down to a comedian’s jokes. If you google Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia, you can find a harsh video of Rogan confronting Mencia about word for word comedy plagiarism.
“The digital age brings content to your doorstep in the blink of an eye and when combined with unscrupulous people it creates a situation where copying someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is too easy,” says Ranger Up CEO Nick Palmisciano. Ranger Up is a mid-sized business that makes military and patriotic apparel, but its success has had a downside: its profitable designs put it in the crosshairs of rival companies who don’t have a moral objection to copyright infringement. The blatant illegal activity keeps Palmisciano on his toes to find and expose copycats. “On average, we send four Cease and Desist letters a week. We have to protect our intellectual property or we have nothing left. Are we copied less than some other similar sized brands? Yes because people know we will move on them when they steal from us.”
Ranger Up’s experiences usually end well once the violator has been identified, but not every case does. Many times the offended party never finds out they’ve been copied or once they do, they don’t have the knowledge, time, or resources to take action. In this digital age the likelihood of getting caught is much higher, but the risk of someone taking action is actually lower. There’s no incentive to not copy someone else’s stuff when the worst you can do is tell them to stop or call them out publicly, which has little to no effect.
“We don’t really have the resources to go after all the copycats,” says Tiffany Oden, owner of the small boutique business, Quinn’s Closet, which operates solely on web-based platforms like Etsy and Facebook. “I catch people copying our dresses long after I’ve made and sold them, but what can I do? I’m a two-person operation.”
You can do a lot actually. If you run a web-based business then the first thing you can do is contact the sales platform about the infringement. “Website providers have mechanisms in place to protect intellectual property that most companies don’t know about,” says Trevor Schmidt of Hutchison PLLC in Raleigh , NC. This low cost mechanism should be the first step in protecting your product. Every platform from Etsy to Facebook has a copyright infringement clause in their terms of service so if you can demonstrate that another business is stealing your property they have the obligation of taking it down.
Step two in the escalation process is to reach out to the offending company personally. “A lot of people have success reaching out to the business owner,” Schmidt says. “Initial contact is frequently effective before getting an attorney involved. If two owners can come to an arrangement and come to a business solution that benefits both sides then that’s the best way to deal with the problem.”
If that doesn’t work then it’s time to call in the people with law degrees, like Schmidt, which usually involves a couple of official letters. The first letter informs the offending party that you, the victim, are under counsel and intend to take legal action, which can also be categorized as a cease and desist letter. The second letter will either address any counterpoints the other side made or ratchet up the pressure to ensure the infringer knows you are serious, and the third is a court summons, but it rarely comes to that, according to Schmidt. “There’s little to be gained for either party in going to court unless there is a lot of money at stake.”
In the case of trademark infringement, a company can file a UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) complaint to object to the registration of a domain name. But be warned…none of these actions prevent the offender from offending again. Businesses who rely on intellectual property must be ever vigilant to ward off the thieves and frequently it’s a game of whack-a-mole, as Palmisciano has learned over the years.
“As bad as these pieces of lowlife scum are, the more damaging thievery comes from rival brands that take successful design concepts and modify them just enough to avoid litigation,” he says. “The most frustrating thing in this business is watching creative people put out great products that they worked hard on, and then seeing uncreative remoras tweak those ideas and call them their own. It’s unearned success, but such is life.”
Everyone has a routine. For some people that routine is to get up and see what they can steal from the creative people of the world and get away with it. Those creative people need to make action part of their routine and not let it happen.
