Consider this question: who owns the material in this article? Is the material Intellectual Property? Is it copyrighted material, and if so, does that copyright belong to the writer of this article or the publisher of this online magazine? Or, perhaps, does “ownership” somehow accrue to the ISP you’re using to read this online? Do some or all of them share ownership, or rights to the content, or the advertising that accompanies the article in the magazine? Do the advertisers have ownership, or perhaps liability, for the content?
Photos you post to a photo sharing site or a social media platform are also digital assets, although the platform or service may claim legal rights, if not ownership, to that as content.
This is intricate, confusing, murky, business.
And then there’s the matter of Digital Assets. What, you might ask, are Digital Assets? Do you have your own website? Do you own a domain (perhaps www.yourname.com or www.yourbusiness.net)? Ownership, in and of itself, is a curious matter. Copyright, or intellectual property, might be the more apt consideration.
Owning a domain enables you to control how it is hosted on the Internet and what content is on the website associated with that domain. But a domain is not limited to just a website. A domain can be a digital storehouse, like Dropbox, OneDrive, or GoogleDrive. All of this might be housed in your domain. A domain can lead the way to an online presence in which a web site and a digital repository can coexist. If you own that domain, you are legally responsible for what is housed in that domain and how it might be used, if accessed via your domain.
Do you have an account with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn. Flickr, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Reddit, or any of the other, social media or business platforms? Or the dating platforms? Do you belong to any Google or Yahoo groups? Or cooking, music, scuba diving or any of the special interest areas that enable users to sign up, create a presence, interact and develop a portfolio or digital dossier of data? When you post to those sites, do you own that data or do the sites retain
Growth & Funding Strategist