Is a Website's Look and Feel Protected?
Is a Website's Look and Feel Protected?
Is a Website's Look and Feel Protected?
The advent of the Internet has totally revolutionized the business world by opening up new avenues for companies and organizations to promote their products and services more effectively. The greatest advantage is increased visibility. With people becoming dependent on the Internet for everything from shopping, booking tickets and gathering information, companies have realized the significance of creating a strong web presence for brand awareness. Hence, companies and organizations now devote a great deal of attention to designing for the web.
The ultimate goal of creating a website is to generate high quality traffic and translate it into sales and profits. Therefore, it is necessary to make the website as attractive, unique, user friendly and informative as possible. Much effort and creative thinking goes into the process of giving a website a distinctive identity of its own that complements a company's image.
Website design and copyright laws
As stated above, much effort goes into the process of designing websites, but a lack of adequate copyright protection has made it easy for others to imitate certain design aspects with no fear of copyright infringement. Copyright laws protect certain aspects of the overall look and feel of a website, including content, images, software code, graphic elements, and others. However, functional elements such as font, style, layouts, color schemes, use of tabs, boxes, hyperlinks and others have little protection under copyright laws. This has given a free hand to imitators who make use of loopholes within copyright laws to copy the look and feel of other websites.
Why should the look and feel of a website be protected?
The "look and feel" of a website is the impression that it creates in the minds of visitors. If the design and style is outstanding, then the customers' minds spontaneously correlate the website design with the company's products and services. Through the website, the company or organization has succeeded in developing a distinctive identity of its own. Hence, imitating website design is nothing short of identity theft.
Website look and feel' and legal protection
There has been an increase in the number of lawsuits regarding the imitation of original website design pending in courts. Understanding the limitations of copyright laws and the implications of not providing adequate legal protection to well-designed websites, courts have decided to enforce protect able trade dress under the Lanham Act, also known as the Trademark Act, on the look and feel of a website. Though trademarks apply to a name, word, phrase, symbol, or image that helps customers to identify it from its competitors, trade dress refers to the image and impression that the product creates to distinguish it from its competitors. This theory is therefore applicable to the case of website look and feel since competitors are essentially trying to create confusion in customers' minds by imitating a web design.
This is a landmark judgment as it would not only reduce the number of ediscovery requests, but would also be a welcome relief for hundreds of companies whose website designs have been imitated. Moreover, if companies want to prevent lawsuits pertaining to web design imitation and subsequent e discovery requests, they should make sure that both website content and design is entirely original.
litigation software, legal electronic discovery,
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