UPDATED: March 17, 2010.

crowdSPRING respects intellectual property – this is one of our core values as a company (before co-founding crowdSPRING, I spent 13 years as an attorney focusing on the protection of intellectual property, for clients around the world). People often ask what crowdSPRING does to protect intellectual property. The Q&A below shares our answers to the most common questions.

1. Does crowdSPRING have specific policies to protect people’s intellectual property rights?

Answer: Yes. crowdSPRING has two specific, written policies designed to protect intellectual property. First, crowdSPRING’s  Copyright Policy makes it easy for copyright owners to report alleged violations of their intellectual property rights. Second, crowdSPRING’s User Agreement prohibits people from selling, reproducing, modifying, displaying, preparing derivative works from, reposting, or using the content found on crowdspring.com – without the express written permission from the owner of the work.

2. What does crowdSPRING do to prevent people’s intellectual property from being stolen?

Answer: The International Chamber of Commerce estimates that the global fiscal loss due to theft of intellectual property is over $600 billion USD per year. Stealing someone else’s intellectual property is a crime in just about every single country on Earth.  However, it is impossible to prevent people from stealing intellectual property (whether the theft occurs online or offline).

Just because it is generally impossible to prevent theft doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t make reasonable efforts to protect intellectual property. Here’s what we do at crowdSPRING:

• We’ve developed and published detailed, comprehensive written policies concerning intellectual property (as you saw in the answer to question 1 above).
• We’ve adopted strict policies and practices governing IP disclosures.
• We’ve developed and published detailed, comprehensive written standards of conduct for creatives (see Q&A 4 below).
• We’ve developed rules and procedures recognizing the importance of original ideas in projects so as to protect original ideas and prevent concept copying (see Q&A 14 below).
• We make it very easy to report possible violations of intellectual property (see Q&A 5 below).
• We work together with our entire community – nearly 55,000 designers strong across the world (our designers come from over 170 countries) to identify possible violations of intellectual property.
• When a creative withdraws their entry, it is screened completely so that no part of it is shown. The word “withdrawn” is instead shown to buyers and other users.
• We permanently bar people from crowdspring.com for violating others’ intellectual property rights (see Q&A 7-10 below).
• We enforce the licensing restrictions of third parties (see for example, Q&A 13 which deals with stock images).
• After a project is completed, we screen with a gray filter all except the winning entries for that project to make it very difficult to review any details associated with non-winning designs.

We have a number of other systems in place that we keep confidential, that help us to protect our community from the theft of intellectual property, and we continue to look for other technological and non-technological ways we can improve our efforts in this area. If you have suggestions, we’d love to hear in the comments to this post.

3. How does crowdSPRING inform its community about crowdSPRING’s intellectual property policies?

Answer: Every time a creative submits a design to a project, they are required to pick one of three statements about their design:

• I created everything in my entry and I didn’t copy anyone else’s concept.
• This design includes photos, illustrations or fonts created by others but I have the right to both use and resell.
• This design includes photos, illustrations or fonts created by others and if the buyer picks it, they’ll have to buy the rights.

A creative cannot participate in a project unless they select one of those three statements. We also publish links to our policies on the participation pages, and in a creative tip’s page visible to everyone in every project.

In logo design projects, we specifically require that designers represent that their logos do not contain any form of stock art. You can read more about our strict stock art policy.

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