Back from the dead…

…or so it would seem. However, know that we had hardly gone dead as much as into incubation.

We had a quiet but successful public launch a few weeks ago. We have been whispering amongst our friends about this update, and passing the word along thus, rather than shouting from the rooftops about it. This is a foray into something that we believe will be strongly shaped by how the user applies the service. So we choose to grow slowly, listen carefully and evolve as per our users’ needs.

So please sign up, utilize your three free credits to test out the service, tell us what you think of it and what you would use your paid credits for and we’ll make sure every credit is worth the cost!

Photography & Copyright Battles

There is no single narrative to how a copyright battle might pan out. Just within the narrow scope of copyright infringement in the photographic medium, one can discover several forms of legal tussles. TheyStoleMyWork brings forth some high-profile copyright infringement cases – one dealing with a historically important photograph and how NYTimes lays false claim on it and another involving Al Gore’s Current TV dragging a photographer back to court to claim back the compensation it had to pay for using his work without permission.

One cannot help but note that copyright violation, once a matter of concern for obscure entities, is now an issue each one of us must prepare to face, as regular content creators online and offline.

Flickr & Copyright

The ability to upload high-quality, full-size images onto Flickr is making it a popular spot for copyright thieves, it seems. Head over to ‘They Stole My Work‘ blog to see two recent examples of Flickr photos used for commercial purposes, allegedly without permission from the photographer.

2010

A week into the new year, the ProtectedCC team hopes that everyone had a wonderful holiday season with much merriment over Christmas!

Wishing each one of you a fabulous 2010!

We expect this to be a defining year for ProtectedCC, and we’re excited about all that we have planned for the weeks and months ahead. Please sign up on your newsletter to keep yourself posted on updates as they occur.

UNESCO & Copyright Protection

For anyone concerned with matters of copyright protection at an international level, this WIPO document on ‘Basic Notions of Copyright & Neighboring Rights’ would be highly relevant. This was the outcome of a roundtable on the issue in 1998 and remains an increasingly relevant topic more than a decade since.

International Copyright

Although this article is written with an American audience in mind, it speaks of relevant measures of ‘Safeguarding Artistic Ownership Around the World’ and how the UNESCO plays a role.

Innovative Ways to Protecting Copyright

The old ways of copyright protection – for instance, sending legal notice to the offender – have lost meaning in the internet era. Easy duplication of files and anonymity online has made it necessary that copyright protection is enforced as a innovative and preventive measure, rather than a post-facto remedial one.

There are some interesting suggestions being made, which can be actioned quite easily by music companies, publishers, etc to enforce copyright protection. But this still does not solve the problem of the cost and effort of policing copyright violation of work produced by individuals – any thoughts on targeted copyright enforcement and what it means to you?

Costs of Protecting Copyright in the Digital Era

The ease of access to cheap technology has been to the detriment to those who generate original ideas – the better their work, the more likely it is to invite copy-cats. Digital copyright has become a hot topic to those who have much to lose and a non-issue for those who feel a sense of entitlement.

This article discusses the implications of copyright protection today – the enormous legal costs and unrealistic demands to monitor copyright violation online being only some of the various facets of this issue.  Free-lancers and independent creatives do not have the kind of resources as Microsoft and other giants do, so how do they to protect their work?

Copyright protection costs have skyrocketed. Microsoft has spent millions of dollars attempting to protect its software from illegal pirating around the world. For every dollar that Microsoft has spent, it has required multiple levels of government to assist them in investigating and prosecuting and spending the same if not more in tax dollars. Now it is reaching pandemic proportions.

Reputation Online: Protecting Your Ideas

Reputation Online did a survey on how agencies would deal with their ideas being stolen from unsuccessful pitches. The result was mostly notable for the all-round acknowledgement of the magnitude of the problem of ideas being ripped off from the pitches. Some suggestions on how to interact with the parties involved were listed, but mostly, there seems to be a resignation to the fact that there is little that can be done to reverse or rectify the act of stealing the idea itself.

And these are large agencies we are referring to. What legal recourse or medium for protesting does a freelancer have if his or her work is ripped off by a client who is substantially larger and has access to legal resources to defend him? Are there any third-party verification tools for free-lancing designers and creatives, who can use such tools to protect their work every time they send it across via email?

What measures do you take to make your ideas ripoff-proof?

Stealth Mode

Protected.CC has gone into proper stealth mode now, so there’s no longer confusion on whether the service is live or not – we understand some of you had tried to email your documents across to us when we were not live and were confounded at not receiving a reply.

Head over to our website Protected.CC now to join our mailing list and keep yourself informed on service updates and company news leading up to the Beta phase.

During our first big meeting post-Launch48, this weekend, some ambitious plans of action were launched. These necessitate much tweaking and fixing in the background. While the service remains a work in progress, why don’t you head over to Twitter and say hello to us?