What to do when your intellectual property (IP) is stolen
Business Economic Syndicated News 
By Anna Jordan on Small Business UK - Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs
Presenting your ideas and imagery is one of the best parts of running an online business. Your website proudly displays the hard work that’s gone into your product or service.
It makes it all the more painful when your ideas appear on another site, on dropshipping sites or on social media advertising. You might see it on selling websites such as Etsy, Temu, Amazon or eBay to sell copycats that are inferior to your own product.
To minimise the damage, we’ll guide you through how to protect yourself against intellectual property (IP) being stolen and what you should do when it happens. In this article, we’ll be talking about video, images, audio and designs.
Sarah Watts, founder of The Chiswick Gift Company, says that her IP gets stolen every week: “It’s a constant whack-a-mole,” she told Small Business.
“The worst case was when two Irish women stole the idea and most of design for my Christmas yearbook. I hired a lawyer who built a water-tight case, which convinced them to stop selling that particular design. Then they went on to take more ideas from our site and change things around enough so that we could not stop them.”
She’ll be weighing in with what works for her business.
Protect yourself against stolen intellectual property
Take these pre-emptive steps to protect your creations.
Watermark images, video and audio
The enormous caveat here that AI and free apps can remove watermarks, unfortunately. Employing these tactics could make your work less of a target.
Cover as much of the image as you can, if possible. As there’s less ‘clean’ surface area, AI can’t predict what was supposed to appear where the watermark was, so the image looks more edited.
Repeat your watermark. More watermarks on an image take more effort to remove and there will be inconsistencies across the image if it’s done with AI.
Place the watermark over a focal point. This one might be more of a tricky sell but putting the watermark over a focal point will make the image or video look distorted if it’s edited.
Make your watermark complex. Use different opacities and textures with finer details. All of this makes your watermark more difficult to tamper with or remove. Remember to watermark your thumbnail images, too.
Set the opacity at 30%-50% for images or 20%-50% for video.
For video, put the watermark on the timeline. This will ensure the watermark appears on the whole video.
Add a watermark on audio. This could be a branded audible mark that plays at intervals throughout your track. Alternatively, you can encode data within the audio frequencies that humans can’t hear but tracking software can.
Reverse image search on a regular basis
Watts advises you to set aside 45 minutes a fortnight to research where your images are appearing. On Google Images, click on the camera on the right of the search bar. This will open Google Lens. From there, simply take a photo or upload the existing one and Google Lens will tell you where it appears around the world. You can use this as evidence when making a copyright claim.
She adds that using a virtual private network (VPN) also allows you to see whether your images are appearing on websites in other parts of the world.
Know the law around copyright
Copyright is automatic with something you create. That means copyright will protect the expression of an idea (book, product, image, etc.), rather than the idea itself. You can put the copyright mark on © alongside your name and the year it was created, but it doesn’t affect the level of protection that you have.
The trade mark’s efficacy is limited as it only covers the UK. There are people stealing IP from UK companies, including Watts’, who are based in the USA, China or other parts of the world.
Copyright will protect your creations but not your brand. That’s why it’s also a good idea to trade mark your brand through the UK Intellectual Property Office.
Register your design
Speaking of the UK Intellectual Property Office, you can also register your design to help protect your product’s appearance, such as shape or pattern. It must be a new design and you must renew your registration every five years.
What to do if you find stolen IP
Though it’s disheartening to see your work being ripped off, it’s important to act quickly.
Contact the seller
In the first instance, try contacting the seller to see if they’ll take it down voluntarily. If you see the website is owned by a company, contact their customer services.
Report it straight to the selling platform
“Amazon and eBay don’t do a lot,” warns Watts. “eBay’s is pretty impenetrable. We’ve tried on both Amazon and Ebay to take down stolen designs and both have done nothing to do so. We simply get an automated response that says they’ve found no evidence of copyright infringement which is simply not true. There is an Amazon seller who is now selling our designs on Temu.”
If you find your images on these platforms, these are the routes to report them.
Etsy
You do not need to be selling on Etsy to create an account and the URLs that you load into the system to prove your IP can be directly to your own website.
“The reporting process takes a few minutes,” said Watts. “Once you’ve taken some time to register your designs as copyright or trade marks, the information stays up on the portal so that every time you see a copy you can simply click a few buttons.”
Etsy’s Reporting Channel is here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/ipmanager/signup
After copyright infringement approach from Etsy, sellers have begged Watts to retract the copyright infringement report, promising that they won’t take any more of her IP.
Amazon
If your brand is enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry, you can submit a report through the Report a Violation tool. Those who aren’t can submit a form through the Report Infringement Form.
“Amazon’s reporting process takes around an hour and a half,” said Watts.
eBay
You need a Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) profile and you can report an infringement from there.
Temu
Report through Temu’s IP Portal along with proof of rights and evidence of the infringement.
It’s a good idea to have these webpages bookmarked as this is likely to become a regular exercise: “We have understood from fellow designers, they [the stolen images and designs] can pop back up at any point,” said Watts.
Check social media and report it to the platform
Similarly, if you find your image on social media – on a post or an advert – contact the platform to let them know that your image has been misused.
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/copyrightform
X
https://help.x.com/en/forms/ipi
https://help.instagram.com/contact/552695131608132
TikTok
https://ipr.tiktokforbusiness.com/legal/report/Copyright
Put a message out to your social media followers
Of course, having support from your followers is reassuring during a distressing time. It also warns customers of fakes to look out for. People can use fake images to scam customers which harms the company’s reputation in turn, so keep them in the know.
My IP still getting stolen
This is an unfortunate consequence of running an online business, as many of your fellow entrepreneurs will tell you.
“Furrow your own path,” said Watts. “We have found that we have to just keep pivoting and keep coming up with new products to stay ahead.”
Read more
Intellectual property – how to protect yours as a start up or scale up – Many owners of start up and scale up businesses overlook the importance of protecting their intellectual property. Zain Ali (pictured) of Centuro Global explains what to do and why
The post What to do when your intellectual property (IP) is stolen appeared first on Small Business UK.
