Protect Intellectual Property on Your Website
April 26th, 2025
Today is Intellectual Property Day, and to mark the occasion, Webnode offers the best tips on how to protect your website’s content. Learn what you can copyright and what you cannot, and how to make the most of Webnode’s features to avoid having your creations stolen.
What does the copyright do
Copyright protects the intellectual property of individual people or groups. Ideas and creations expressed concretely are intellectual property, for example: poems, words, expressions, song lyrics, music, inventions, designs, logos and emblems, and names of products or brands.
The rights define how a work may be used and for how long. For example how authors share earnings or if one or more copyrights are transferable through contracts or licenses. A singer or songwriter sells their copyrights to the record company which partially or entirely owns the creation.
An original idea only becomes intellectual property when it is physically expressed.
Copyright online
If your creations are your prime source of income, as it is for copywriters, designers, illustrators, or online shops that sell homemade products, protecting them with copyright online is a must.
Anyone who establishes their own brand should have a copyright on it to prevent unauthorized use, including:
- File sharing
- Content theft
- Framing
- Copying legal documents, such as the disclaimer and privacy policy
Protecting your intellectual property with Webnode
When you create your website, e-shop, or blog with the Webnode website builder, Webnode offers you the following ways to secure your intellectual property.
Webnode protects your intellectual property
Register your domain with privacy protection
Your name is everything. Don’t let your business website run under a subdomain and register your unique domain name. With your own domain name, you automatically declare that what can be seen on your website belongs to you, your domain.
If you register your domain without privacy protection, your personal information will be visible in online databases to anyone who searches for your domain. This makes it easier for domain dealers to contact you to buy off your name.
Others may intentionally take the opportunity to run your name under a different local domain. Data protection does not release your personal contact information and makes you less vulnerable.
Backup your content
How does having backups of your website content protect you from content theft? It happens indirectly because you document the creation of your works with the backups. Documentation and evidence is essential for survival when proving that your work is truly yours.
A backup is a saved copy of your website that you can restore if something goes wrong — for example, if you accidentally delete content or want to return to an earlier version of your site.
With the Standard, Professional, and Business packages, Webnode allows you to manually create and manage backups. This means it’s your responsibility to create backups whenever you want, as well as to delete them when they are no longer needed.
Starting from the Limited package, you also have the option to purchase automatic backups as an add-on. These backups are created automatically by the system and include a copy of your website from the previous day and the last two Sundays are backed up.
Password-protected pages
If you want to share exclusive content, like a gallery of your latest sketches, with specific website visitors such as your followers or regular customers, you can protect individual pages with a password. Any visitor can request a password, but only you can grant access.
With the Standard Package, you can approve a password for up to 100 members. From the Professional onwards, you can welcome unlimited members.
Acquiring members is a wonderful way to make the website experience more personal and even more special. Plus, you make your work more exclusive.
Purchase your Premium Standard plan and register your first followers
Website security
With Site Security, you shield everything sent to you via your contact form from malware and spam. But not only that! The additional function lets you specifically exclude regions from accessing your entire web content by blocking IP addresses. This prevents suspicious people from accessing and potentially copying your content. Site Security can be purchased with the Limited Package or higher.
Make sure to enable Site Security when you purchase your Premium Service
Prevent web content theft with these effective methods
In addition to the Webnode features that protect your creations, there are other options, like protecting your own images from illegal downloading. The following methods are essential:
Label intellectual property
Make sure your work is easily identified as yours by adding your logo or signature to your illustrations, sketches, and infographics. Don’t forget to cite your own work and include detailed descriptions in your legal documents. Proper documentation is key to protecting your intellectual property.
Copyright
Register the copyright to your brand, your company, or your name. As a copywriter or artist, you can register your name with Creative Commons through a license agreement. Under protectmywork.com, anyone can have their name or trademark globally protected.
Trademark
Do you sell products that carry your name? Register your trademark globally online on various platforms to protect your logo design.
Your brand is the overall impression of your company, whereas the trademark only protects part of it, such as your logo or company name.
Apply for a patent
Patents are usually filed for specific methods, strategies, blueprints, chemical compositions, and other inventions. The European Commission makes it possible in Europe. For the US, you apply with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Documentation of your work
As mentioned earlier, the exact recording of the steps for the creation of your works, notes, videos, and backups over the entire time of creation proves that the source is YOU.
Start at the beginning. You can kill two birds with one stone and create a vlog about the behind-the-scenes of your makings. This provides evidence but also entertains or informs your audience.
Non-disclosure agreements (NDA)
If you are sharing future projects or ideas with partners and want to keep them confidential, a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) can help protect your work from being prematurely shared. This is especially useful if you are collaborating and sharing with others.
Watermark
If you don’t want others to download your images and illustrations on your website, you can make them “unsuitable” for others by watermarking them. You only give the original to those who buy it. A watermark can also be used for texts, technical drawings, plans and maps.
Here, it is common to make your logo appear transparent as a layover. You can create such a watermark with simple drawing programs like Canva or even with PowerPoint.
Cybersecurity & Security Software
With Webnode’s Site Security and SSL protocol your website is already well-secured. Other software is dedicated to controlling your web content. With Pixsy, you can track down and trace unwanted traffic to your web content.
Pagefreezer, in addition to your backups, records every step you take on your website and saves them as time stamps. A very precise method when it comes to documenting your creations.
Plagiarism checker software scans text in multiple languages. Also spelling and grammar correctors like Grammarly provide an AI-powered check for such duplicates.
Brand protection software, like Brand24 or ZeroFox monitors the web for actions harming your brand, such as data breaches and trademark infringements.
Checklist to protect your website’s intellectual property.
Things subject to copyright
Not everything can be protected by copyright. First of all, a list of what you can legally protect:
- Images & Screenshots from the Internet
- Adobe Seal of Authenticity for Images
- Videos
- Scientific Papers
- Texts
- Music
- Films
- Plans and drawings
No intellectual property protection
The following cannot be protected:
- Interviews
- Recipes
- AI-generated images and text
In other words, they may be reproduced or copied without consent.
Protecting your intellectual property starts with making your work clearly identifiable by registering your name, and is further proven by the documentation of your work. For your web content, this means your domain name. Password-protected pages, backups and the targeted blocking of your website are desirable functions to protect your content from theft.
Protect your website content today
Intellectual Property FAQs:
What do I do with images or texts that do not belong to me?
If you show photos, illustrations, or graphics that you did not create yourself, you must name the author. Sometimes, the naming is contractually concluded. This may be an option if you’re showing videos from others.
Don’t worry, if you choose a template with Webnode, you’ll find images that Webnode has purchased exclusively for use on your website. Please check with customer support, who will give you more information about whether you can use the images on other platforms or your business cards.
If I use AI to create content on my website, is it still mine?
Webnode has an AI helper that generates all your subpages, texts and images for your website in seconds. If you don’t change anything about it, it’s not your creation. However, we assume that you use artificial intelligence as a support to effectively create something new, individual and authentic that is you.
Spice up what AI has created with your own personal touch. For example, you can point out that AI was used to generate photos of a fantasy world that simply looks better on your gaming website.
Can someone copy my entire website?
No, because to do this, the person would have to dig into the source code of the website and copy the complete backend. The coding of websites created with website builders like Webnode is secure and the backend cannot be hacked.
Are websites with the same template not copies?
No, because even if you create two of the same websites with the same template and content, they differ in their subdomain.
Furthermore, search engines like Google prohibit duplicate content. These are automatically removed from the Worldwide Web. Read our SEO tips to make your content relevant and unique to search engines.