Inbound Marketing Blog

The internet continues to shake up the world of copyright law. Most people don't know exactly what copyright infringement entails, and it's constantly getting them into BIG trouble. 

One of the more popular cases over the years that ended up favorably was Lenz versus Universal Music Corp. In 2007, a very proud mother posted a video of her daughter lip syncing to a Prince song, then posted it on Youtube for all the world to enjoy. Universal Music Corp was not amused and forced Youtube to take the video down because they felt the mother's video violated their copyright of the song.

Recently we had an issue with a new client. The old website provider decided that they were not happy we took over web marketing for this client and sent us a nice letter telling us that we needed to remove the website under the DMCA.

Before we had a chance to even think about responding we got a notification from our hosting provider that they were going to take it down because of failure to comply with the DMCA.

The problem was that all the brand elements on the site were brand elements of the client (taken from their artwork). All the images on the site were stock photos... pretty sure that this web builder doesn't own those images. And the content was so bad that we changed it this week anyway as part of the new contract.

The best part is that the bottom of the old website said, very specifically, that the copyright was our client's. So, it was reasonable to assume that our client owned the copyright.

You'd think that, too, if it was yours, right?