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?

Media: Techfluff.tv covered Launch48

Techfluff.tv was on venue to cover live our venture to create something out of nothing during the Launch48. Here are the 6 videos talking about the teams’ ambitions for the weekend. Note that this was so early stage that Protected.CC was not even called that then – we were Verifi back then, back when we were oh-so-young

Minibar Meetup, London

On 30th Oct, 2009, like on every last Friday of the month, London internet professionals and entrepreneurs will be meeting up at a bar near Truman Breweries for the Minibar event.

This month’s meetup is on ‘Security & Identity’, a field close to the area Protected.CC is in.

Ensuring your website is protected against hacking, spoofing and other security issues is crucial for any web company. Likewise securing personal data you collect against theft and loss in the era of social media is essential. For this reason MiniBar has partnered with the Knowledge Transfer Network for Digital Communications to focus on ‘Security and Identity’.

Rest of the details of the event here. If you are at the event, please come and say hello to the unmissably crazy-haired, talkative Sherene from Protected.CC

In the beginning…

Here’s a record of our early views on the market and service. It will be interesting to see how we evolve by the time we bring the product to market and what bits from the Launch48 weekend stay. Much pruning and re-moulding lies ahead, as we learn more about the market and its needs.