{"id":44,"date":"2008-07-30T17:05:55","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T21:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/?p=44"},"modified":"2025-03-28T10:51:55","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T14:51:55","slug":"who-owns-your-website-likely-not-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/2008\/07\/30\/who-owns-your-website-likely-not-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Owns Your Website? Likely, Not You."},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"ttr_start\"><\/div><p>I was just asked this by a client of mine. They wanted to know if they had the rights to the <a title=\"HTML Defined\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/HTML\">HTML code<\/a> on their site.<\/p>\n<p>HTML code is the computer language your website is written in. It looks like this:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p>I&#8217;m not a lawyer, and this question falls under <a title=\"Internet Law\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Internet_law\">internet law<\/a>, so I had to do a little digging to give her a correct answer. I did find a great article on <a title=\"Who Owns Your Website?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.iowabiz.com\/2007\/06\/who-owns-your-1.html\">what you own (or don&#8217;t own) on your website<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out, unless <strong>you clearly specify in a contract that you own the rights to x item<\/strong> created for you site, <strong>you don&#8217;t own them<\/strong>. This includes such things as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: \">The design<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: \">The software (HTML) code<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: \">The domain name<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: \">The graphics<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: \">The content (words)<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: \">The terms of use and privacy policies<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: \">It turns out intellectual property laws are designed to protect the creator, not the purchaser. The laws were created to encourage the creator to create.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>If you hire someone to create anything for your site, what you are actually purchasing is a \u201clicense\u201d to use the creation for the use intended by you and the creator.<\/p>\n<p>So make sure you get it in writing if you want to have any ownership over your site.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ttr_end\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You don&#8217;t own your website. Really, you don&#8217;t. It&#8217;s pieces are owned by every &#8216;creator&#8217; you employed to make it what it is today. Your developer owns the code. Your designer owns the design. You have just licensed it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-being-an-innerpreneur"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11047,"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/11047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elasticmind.ca\/innerpreneur\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}