« How To Earn $36/Hour Selling Hugs | Home | Newbies Want Quantity, Pros Want Quality »
Avoiding Copyright Infringement On Work-For-Hire
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
It seems like a good idea… Hire someone to do some work for you. Whether it’s creating website designs, having website content or graphics created, having someone write an ebook or articles for you, it’s a way to get more done in less time by leveraging the work of others.
The problem: How do you know the person you’ve hired didn’t steal or plagiarize the work they’re passing off to you as their own?
2nd Problem: If you pay someone to create a website for you, and they just go out and copy a competitor’s site, complete with graphics and text, you are the one responsible.
What to do:
1) Have anyone who does work for you sign a written statement that they did the work themselves and that they didn’t plagiarize or steal the content. That can deter some people, but if you’re hiring people from other countries to do work cheaply, they may not care.
2) Grab snippets of text they’ve written, put it in quotations, and run Google searches on the exact phrases. (Not entire paragraphs, but sentences, or 1/2 sentences, etc.)
…You may quickly find a website(s) with that exact content on it, in which case yours is plagiarized, or at best, was created with PLR (Private Label Rights) content that is not unique. If you discover this, inform the person you hired that it is not acceptable, and either cancel the job or have them do it right.
When it comes to graphics, it’s not quite as easy to determine, but do your due diligence.
The problem is even worse if you’re having a product created for others to re-sell. In that case, you have to be even more careful, because not only do you open yourself to copyright infringement lawsuits, but you open up those you’ve sold the product rights to as well.
There are many horror stories about these types of issues. -Be careful.
Topics: Oops (Bad Move) | Trackback URL