At first glance, copyright law seems pretty straightforward — I created the content, so I own it and get to dictate how and where it’s used, right? But when you start digging into the idea of adding a copyright notice to your website, you’ll quickly discover how complex and nuanced it is.
I’ve had conversations with frustrated clients who spend a great deal of time with me to produce top-notch content, only to find it copied and pasted onto other websites. I worked on one particular website in a highly competitive tourist city where new attractions and tours open every year.
My client noticed a new attraction competing within the same genre had adopted a very similar look and feel on their website, to the point where you would have trouble distinguishing between the two sites and brands. When every ticket sale counts, this level of infringement has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.
So what can my clients and I do when this happens? Here’s where a copyright notice can give fair warning to intellectual thieves and ensure you have the strongest position possible in the event of taking legal action against them.
Table of Contents
- What Is a Copyright Notice?
- How to Write a Copyright Notice
- Copyright Notice Examples
- Copyright Notice Template
What Is a Copyright Notice?
A copyright notice is a short piece of text to indicate intellectual ownership of content and signal that it should not be copied or distributed without permission. A copyright notice can be included on websites or individual images, or within the title and description of a video to protect the intellectual property of the content owner.
Do you need a copyright notice on your website?
No, a copyright notice is not a requirement for your website. However, there are some advantages to having a copyright notice in place should you ever find yourself having to tackle the issue of copyright infringement through legal proceedings.
There are a few other reasons why I always recommend including one on a site.
Firstly, they’re so commonplace now that people expect to see them. So, including a copyright notice establishes a sense of legitimacy for your brand and website. It’s worth noting here that notices are commonplace because so are copyright infringements. In fact, Google processed over 1 billion DMCA requests in just four months.
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Secondly, it indicates to would-be intellectual thieves that you take the ownership of your content seriously. This might give some of them pause for thought before stealing or imitating it. As Kaz Marzo, operations manager at Image Acquire, told me, “Copyright notices on websites act like a ‘No Trespassing’ sign — it’s a clear heads-up that the content is owned, and borrowing it isn't free for all.”
It might seem extreme, especially if you’re an individual creator or small business. Who would want to steal website content from you and what could you do about it if they did? But as I learned with the tourism client I mentioned above, it’s a real threat for any type of online content and can have real-world financial consequences.
In this case, the competitor was clearly making a big push to capture organic search traffic. They were also running social media ads. The longer the situation was allowed to play out, the greater the damage. It was going to become harder to establish to unknowing searchers and social media users that my client was the original version of the brand and business.
Even someone who was specifically looking for my client’s website on Google could easily have become confused and ended up on the competitor site. Between graphics and copy lifted directly from our site and the overall brand confusion, it became a mixture of copyright and trademark infringement.
Ultimately, the client decided to send out legal notices to the competitor through their attorney. Luckily, that’s all that was needed in this case. The competitor chose to rebrand and update their website and content accordingly.
My client did have a copyright notice on their site, but it didn’t stop a brazen competitor from stealing content. However, having the notice there goes a long way towards discouraging this type of intellectual property theft. Marzo agrees, noting that “skipping a copyright notice can blur lines when disputes over ownership arise, making enforcement as murky as a fogged-up windshield.”
Is a copyright notice legally required?
No, copyright notices are not a legal requirement. When you produce something, intellectual property rights are inherently applied to your work. But again, having one in place gives you a stronger position from which to argue your case if you need to take legal action against someone for stealing your work.
This is the other reason I always recommend having a copyright notice in place. When it comes to a website, the avenues available to me to complain about copyright infringement are limited. Circumstances are different in other digital spaces like social media. On social platforms, there are teams and technologies that handle complaints about copyright infringement and remove content from their platforms accordingly.
When it comes to a website, I’d have to submit DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaints in multiple places. For example, it’s pretty straightforward to submit these to Google. If Google agrees that my copyright has been infringed, it can delist the offending website from search results and remove it from other Google services and platforms.
But my journey isn’t over here. The website still exists, it’s just not available on Google anymore.
So, I’d have to start submitting DMCA requests to any platform I can think of to further reduce the site’s presence online. Even then, users could still type the site URL directly into the browser and access it. At that point, I can try to find the hosting provider of the site and hope that they’ll take action. But the site owner still owns the domain and they might just switch to a different hosting provider. So maybe I’ll contact the domain registrar, but some have stricter policies than others.
In the end, official legal action may be my only recourse.
What about AI-generated content?
Yes, what about AI-generated content? Few topics have sparked more debate in the editorial world than the issue of who owns the copyright over content generated by AI tools.
Currently, any copy, images, and other content generated by AI would need a human “owner” for copyright to apply. But who would that be? The creator of the AI technology or the person using the tool? Or maybe no one at all?
It’s a conversation that’s happening across multiple digital and content spaces, and something Marzo has noticed too. “With AI's ability to generate content at warp speed, the traditional boundaries of copyright are being pushed and pulled like never before,” says Marzo.
But are those boundaries going to be fully defined any time soon?
As of writing, the U.S. Copyright Office does not recognize content generated solely by AI as having any copyright. However, if a human edits and adds to AI-generated content, they would own the copyright.
But that’s not the only question mark raised by AI tools. Debates about plagiarism of copyrighted content by the AI tools themselves are also ongoing among experts who, as Marzo points out, “often find themselves scrambling to redraw lines that AI keeps blurring.”
For example, I have published articles about an extremely niche topic. I know for a fact that no other content exists about the topic. When I ask an AI tool like Chat GPT to write me something about that topic, it spits out content and context that I recognize as entirely my own. So, would someone who made a similar query of Chat GPT and published the answer be guilty of infringing the copyright on my work?
The arguments rage on, but the fact is that AI does not exist in a vacuum. Vast amounts of human-created works are fed to these models in order to train and improve them. Not only can this be considered unauthorized use, but AI models have also generated content extremely similar to existing human work.
I’m not the only content creator to be rubbed the wrong way by this development. In 2023, a collective of artists and photographers filed a class-action lawsuit accusing AI companies of using their work to train AI models without any authorization or permission. By August 2024, the judge ruled that the case could move forward, but only in relation to a very specific copyright infringement law.
As a recent article in Artnet pointed out, the lawsuit now fails to address the heart of the AI vs. human artists debate, focusing on unauthorized storage of the materials rather than whether using them to train AI infringes on their copyright. It’s just one example of several ongoing AI-based lawsuits.
Still, many experts predict that more and more class-action suits may be on the horizon once early cases like this have played out. If an increasing number of lawsuits are successful, AI companies may have to pay to license works they use for training, or a new form of creative commons licensing specifically for AI might be introduced.
How to Write a Copyright Notice
- Use the copyright symbol or mention the term.
- Add the year of publication.
- Add the name of the copyright owner.
- Include your rights statement.
- Add the copyright notice to your site.
1. Use the copyright symbol or mention the term.
You can copy and paste the symbol “©” by searching the term “copyright symbol” on a search engine. On most Mac desktops, you can hit “Option” and the letter “G” to generate it, and “Alt” followed by the numbers 0169 on Windows devices. Alternatively, you can generate the copyright symbol using HTML code if needed.
You can also just type out the word “Copyright” instead.
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2. Add the year of publication.
After the copyright symbol, add the year the content was published. With a website, you’ll typically update this every year to the current year because website content changes so often.
Some brands choose to keep the entire site range in the date of publication, from the time the site was first published up until now. For example, you can add 2014-2024, rather than a static year.
3. Add the name of the copyright owner.
In most cases, this will be your company name, or the full name of the individual who owns the website.
If you’re using a company name, make sure it’s the legal name of the corporate entity and not just the brand name, like in the example above.
4. Include your rights statement.
The most straightforward and commonly used rights statement is “all rights reserved.” This means that the content cannot be used, copied or distributed without the owner’s permission.
You might spot other license types on websites like Pexels, where artists and photographers offer their work to use for free. Other sites might permit free use, but with visible attribution required. But the most common rights statement for websites is “all rights reserved.”
5. Add the copyright notice to your site.
Once your notice is ready, the final step is adding it to a place where it’s visible throughout your whole site.
The most common location is the global site footer, which is the banner at the very bottom of your website. You can typically access it through the settings of your website builder, or you can pass the copyright notice to your developer and request that they add it to the footer.
Copyright Notice Examples
1. Apple Website Copyright Notice
Here’s an example of a copyright notice from the Apple website:
Apple has used the typical “All rights reserved” terms and included both the word “Copyright” and the symbol in its notice.
2. Bensound Attribution Terms
Bensound is a website that provides free background music tracks for videos. However, while the license is free-to-use, attribution is required. Here’s how that notice looks (with a link to their full terms) when you go to download a sound file on the site:
3. Pexel’s Copyright Notice on Image Files
Pexel provides free-to-use images. When you open an image from the site search, you’ll see “Free to use” text in the bottom left corner.
Clicking the link brings me to a more detailed explanation of the usage permissions, including the right to modify the image and use without attribution.
Copyright Notice Template
Copyright notices are not complicated to create, but I’ve provided some quick templates for you to copy and paste as needed. Just remember to replace the placeholder text with the name of the legal entity that owns the copyright.
I’ve provided a few different variations depending on your preferences:
- Copyright © [Legal Entity Name] [Year of Publication]. All rights reserved.
- © [Legal Entity Name] [Year of Publication]
- © [Year of Publication] [Legal Entity Name]
- © [Legal Entity Name] [Year Range of Site Publication]. All rights reserved.
Copyright Notices to Ward Off the Content Thieves
As I’ve outlined, creating and adding a copyright notice to your website is a pretty simple task. But its importance is not to be underestimated. If you end up in a situation like my client, having a copyright notice could be the difference between successful or unsuccessful legal action to protect your site from plagiarism. Now that we’ve got AI in the mix, that issue is more complicated than it's ever been.
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