Last updated on June 23rd, 2023 at 09:31 am
INTRODUCTION
Plagiarism and intellectual property violations are rampant in the design industry and are one of the main problems that interior designers face. So many interior designers have experienced while presenting a design proposal to a prospective client that their styling of a living or workspace with a unique concept has been plagiarized. In some cases, clients themselves hire another firm to implement the proposed interior design for a lower cost without awarding the contract to the original designer.
Like any piece of art or any creative product, an interior designer’s work should be protected as intellectual property, ideas that belong solely to them and are non-transferrable. But sadly, this is not the case and has also been intensified by the current client relation practices, social media and also knockoff design markets.
The knockoff design markets that started as an innocent-enough aggregation of design inspiration quickly morphed into online marketplaces for cheap knockoff designs. These platforms take advantage of people’s work in order to peddle their low-budget knockoffs. These types of websites are among the greatest rising threats to a designers’ intellectual property.
Although an interior designer cannot completely control the distribution of his interior design proposals after sending them to the client, the use of document security technology reduces the chances of your ideas being copied. When you make it more difficult for your design proposals to be repurposed or outright stolen, you show prospective clients that you take your intellectual property rights seriously. Document security measures can include the following:
PDF Password Protection
Although not a perfect way to protect your document, it is an extra step to cross for anyone trying to access your document improperly. It can be especially effective in combination with other security measures.
Watermarking
Watermarking has traditionally been used to claim ownership or act as a trademarking device for documents, but in the digital sense, watermarking has further applications. It discourages the leakage of confidential documents and includes some means of traceability should those documents get spread further than intended. One strategy is to watermark digital documents with the recipient’s own email address, thus providing the source of the leak.
Document expiry and self-destruct:
There are times when you might like to either revoke access to a document, or limit access so that it’s not permanently available to the recipients of a document. This could be because an employee has left your organization or a contractor is no longer working for you and you no longer want them to access your documents. Or you have an offer for a limited period only and don’t want it to be accessed after the preset time frame. Or you’d like to prevent a link from being reused after download of a document. All of these situations can be managed using document expiry revocation of access and self-destruct features.
Expiration is the ability to limit access until a fixed date and time. A self-destruct timer will count down from the time that a recipient opens the PDF or other document. In the business context, this feature can be used to impose a one-time link, where a document will be valid for the approximate time needed to view the document or file. Revocation is the act of disabling access, or “taking back” the file after it has been opened or sent. It can be useful in cases where a file is sent out by mistake, and you need to undo the mistake. Or, perhaps you need to make a crucial update and don’t want people viewing the document until that has been done.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) enables the control of what the reader can do with the document. DRM is usually in place for documents which contain sensitive information or intellectual property that the document owner doesn’t want copied or spread around. Document tracking comes in as an important security feature. PDF file and document tracking solutions help you to understand the movement of your documents and whether they are spread beyond your intended audience. You can look at information such as where your document is being opened from and take note if there seems to be suspicious activity. Potentially, if you have other measures in place such as revocation of access, you’ll be able to do something about it.
Although you can never completely protect your documents in our hyper connected world, you can make it harder for others to make off with your work by using document security technology. This also lets clients know that you don’t take your intellectual property rights for granted and you will defend them.
The Confiex team specializes in providing premium virtual data room solutions tailored for businesses. With their vast experience in working with document sharing platforms, they have been actively supporting the Virtual Data Room community since 2015 by offering valuable information to users free of charge.