Copyright and intellectual property

Intellectual property, often called ‘IP’, is a way of talking about your ideas and other intangible (non-physical) things that you create. When you create a website, you may be using someone else’s IP, but you might also be creating your own IP.

(IP also has another meaning in web development, as you may have heard of IP addresses. This is a computer’s identification number on the internet; these are totally different, they just share an acronym.)

When you are working for a company, whether that is freelance or as an employee, you are generally going to be giving whoever is paying you the rights over the intellectual property you create. If you are a freelancer and you’re working on something very new and complex for someone, you might want to consider bargaining for some of the IP as if the company goes on to sell your code to someone else, you might be able to get a share of any profit.

There are a few main sorts of intellectual property in web development:

1. Copyright: This is a way of saying, “This is my code, and you can’t use it without asking.” Whenever you create something, you hold the copyright automatically and you can then ask anyone who shares or copies your work to remove it.
2. Patents: Think of patents as special licenses for unique and new ideas or inventions. They give you exclusive rights to use and share your cool new ideas for a certain period. To patent something, you need to apply for a patent which can be a difficult and expensive process. One challenge of patents if that after a certain amount of time, the patent will become public so companies often avoid this.
3. Trademarks: These are like logos or brand names for your software or apps. They help people recognise your work and prevent others from pretending to be you or using your name. You need to register your trademarks, which costs money.
4. Open source: Many developers will share things under an open source agreement, which means that other people can use them freely. These usually state whether you need to give credit or not, whether you can change the thing you are using, and whether you can use it for commercial (money-making) purposes. There are lots of different open source agreements, some popular ones are the MIT license and the GNU license.

When you are making a website, you also need to think about how you are using other people’s intellectual property. For example, make sure you don’t use any music which is copyrighted, and make sure that you don’t use any images which you don’t have permission to use!

This is why many people use stock images and music, as you are allowed to use these without having to worry about breaching copyright and facing legal issues. There are free stock image and music collections online, or there are some very large stock image libraries that you need to pay to access.

If you do break someone’s copyright, whether you mean to or not, they can ask you to remove the copyrighted materials from your website. If you don’t do this, then they can have your website taken down by the domain hosting service, and you can be sued – so always make sure that you have permission if you’re using copyrighted materials!

Optional exercise: Accessing free stock images

You might want to look around these two sites that allow you to use stock images for free (you still have to credit the creator when you use them, however):

Pixabay

MorgueFile

The next step will give you the opportunity to test your understanding about being a legally-compliant and ethical developer.