This information is not legal advice and should not be taken as such; we are instead providing some ways of protecting your resources for you to consider. All resources on Tes Resources are protected by the terms of the licence they are made available under. Further details about choosing a licence can be found in our FAQs.
In addition to the protection provided by the resource licence, once you make and share a resource, it is automatically copyright protected under international law. However, many authors include a Copyright Notice for their work – this should include:
the copyright symbol ©,
the year you completed your resource,
your name as the copyright owner,
(for example, © Suzy Adams 2018).
The licence under which your resource is shared is automatically included in the resource description. To learn more about licences including different forms of Creative Commons licences, click FAQs.
You can provide Terms of Use to clarify to the person downloading or purchasing your resource exactly what they can and cannot do with your work. There is no single template for effective Terms of Use, as the terms need to be tailored to own needs. You can seek legal advice to draft specific and relevant terms for your work, however, this could come at a significant cost.
To make your Terms of Use visible, you can place them at the beginning of all of your resources, after a cover page, and/or in your resource descriptions.
Watermarks can also play a role in protecting your resources. You may wish to add a custom watermark to the preview images in your resources, like the example in the image below. You can do this in PowerPoint by creating an image/text box and using the transparency slider under the formatting options. Remember to make sure the slide is still legible behind your watermark.
To protect your hard work you can also monitor your resources, by regularly searching for a combination of indicators of your work online, such as: your first and last names, your shop name and resource titles.
Being proactive in this way can mean that you spot unauthorised use of your resources, and can act more quickly when anyone infringes your intellectual property. You can even set up an automated search to make this easier (daily, weekly, monthly etc.) with alerts to notify you of a relevant search.