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Total Protected work, 23 Jul 2008 : 8,048

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	April 2005 Computer Arts

	Issue 103 Web Designer Magazine

	July 2005 Design Week

	Independent witnessing of your intellectual property

	Proves originality for your work

	Prevents copyright infringement

	Deter others from using your work without permission

	Only £20 p.a. membership & £1 per submission thereafter

How to Copyright Music, Photos & Websites

Copyright protection for music, photos, websites, graphic designs or any creative work.

Protect My Work is a user-friendly and affordable solution to copyright theft; creatives can register their work at any development stage or before pitching the idea or emailing the prototype to their client. Using our simple email system, we record details such as the sender, receiver, the time and date the work was submitted ensuring that all work is logged and credited to its rightful owner while backing up and securing all data. All you have to do is attach the work to an email and send to protect@protectmywork.com. It couldn't be quicker or simpler.

Once an author has submitted their work, the date of submission cannot be altered and is therefore an extremely reliable source to prove the originality of one’s work. Work submitted to Protect My Work is NEVER opened or looked at. Our automated system receives the work and stores it on our secure servers.

What Does it Cost?

Protect My Work keep costs simple. We do not have complicated pricing structures by server space or the amount of work you store. Our charges are:

£ 20 per year for account setup and maintenance.

A £1 token is required for each piece of work submitted thereafter. You can submit up to 5 individual files with one token.

Protect My Work or poor man's copyright?

With the worldwide use of the websites giving people access to everything from photos to music to designs, it is not surprising that copyright breaches are becoming more widespread. In response to these violations, some lawyers have suggested a “simple” solution to protecting your work and propose that posting yourself a copy of the work, also called the 'poor man's copyright', provides enough proof of the original author.

However, how does someone print and post a piece of music with lyrics or the entire code to a software programme? If stored hard copies are an author’s only proof of ownership, what happens if the documents are misplaced or damaged? Many designers, artists and writers find themselves with many pieces of design work each month. Are they to be posted and stored indefinitely? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?

UK Copyright law states that you must prove you are the original author of a piece of work. Should anyone copy your intellectual property you will have to prove in court that you are the original author and the ideas of the work are original. The easiest way to do this is to keep draft versions of the work. A court can then see the different development stages of the work and be sure the work was original. The ‘poor man's copyright’ system could prove to be difficult for a writer who has to continuously post themselves draft versions of their book…and then find somewhere to store them!

Copyright protection for your computer files ?

You can protect any type of digital file with Protect My Work. Any file format can be emailed or uploaded to our system. For example: .doc, .jpg .gif .bmp .png .psd .xls, mp3, the list goes on. The only file that cannot be submitted is an .exe. Design work, product design ideas, illustrations, business plans, music, photographs, poems,scripts, even whole websites can be recorded if the files are emailed us.

What will Protect My Work do if my work is copied?

If your work is used without permission and registered with us, we can provide you with valuable evidence should your case go to court. Protect My Work will provide you with an affidavit. An affidavit is a written, sworn statement that is acknowledged and endorsed in front of a Notary Public. An affidavit may be used in place of oral testimony in court.

Proof of authorship using the Internet helps avoid printing reams of paper (environmentally friendly!) and is more time efficient. If we were to print and post each design and intellectual property item to ourselves we would be spending too much time, and energy on printing, purchasing stamps, stuffing envelopes and then trying to find somewhere to store all these sealed envelopes!

The internet might be the perfect get away vehicle for a patent thief, but authors should in fact embrace the internet and use it to their advantage - not shy away from it.