This week, a few of the graphic designers had spread the word about customized social media icons. They alerted us all to not modify any sizes, shapes, and colors on any social media icons due to a risk of copyright infringement. I learned something about the copyright and trademark laws, I decided to go ahead and write here so this post should be helpful.
As a web and graphic designer, I must cancel all the customized social media icons from my design services in order to avoid an violation of the copyrights and trademarks from other companies, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social medias. I feel that I should and would take action and do the right thing and honor the copyrights and laws. My business, Dragonfly Creative Design Studio Perfectly Irresistible, is very important to me and my clients, but I had sent all previous clients about the customized social media icons and made sure that they needed to know. I, however, encouraged my previous clients to contact me about removing the customized social media icons -or- their blogs will and can be suspended. Unfortunately, some previous clients had not responded back. I guess, they made their choices themselves.
As of September 20, 2013, I, a web and blog designer, cannot customize all social media icons and install them in any blog or web designs anymore. If you want to customize your own social media icons, it’s your call. Not mine, period.
If you want to do your research through the copyright and trademark laws, please visit a few articles that may interest to you:
1. Honoring copyright: Legal ways to use social media logos. http://www.hivestrategies.com/2011/05/honoring-copyright-part-2-legal-ways-to-use-common-social-media-platform-logos/
2. Angie Makes’ Losing Her Day Job: http://angiemakes.com/improper-use-social-media-icons/[As of September 24, 2013 – Angie Makes’ Post Deleted] As of October 8, 2013 – NEW post from Angie Makes: Improper Social Media Icons – http://angiemakes.com/improper-use-social-media-icons/
3. Improper Use of Social Media Icons Can Cost You Big Time: http://morefromyourblog.com/facebook-cracking-down-on-logo-usage/
Readers, thank you for your understanding and for your cooperation about following the copyright and trademark laws.
P.S. As of January 25, 2015 – I have already learned that Goggle’s Blogger.com can remove the blogs due to an violation of the copyright and trademark laws. BUT, something is really interesting about the self-wordpress.ORG. If you have current self-wordpress.org, you are allowed to control your OWN. You can customize your custom social media icons – UNLESS the lawyers send you an warning and ask you to remove or alter the proper social media icons via the emails (or letters).
For me, I can control whatever I like here, because this is the self-wordpress.org and it gives me great opportunity to customize my blog here. Anything in here is available. For you as my clients from Goggle’s Blogger.com, I cannot able to customize the social media icons (sorry).
GREAT NEWS for the clients from the Self-Wordpress.org – I can customize whatever you like for the social media icons. I hope that this is more clear to you.
Unfortunately, Goggle’s Blogger.com can easily track down whoever violating the terms and shut down the blogs without anyone’s knowledge due to that Goggle.com owns what its can control, bloggers cannot have that as their own. For other reasons than that, bloggers from Goggle’s Blogger.com would possibly lost the blogs.
My encouragement to you all is to do your own research more and figure out what’s the best for you. You can decide which one of the best platform for your blog (or website): Blogger.com vs. WordPress.org.
Thank you, again for reading.
If you have any questions or concerns, send me an email at perfectirresistible@gmail.com.
* Comments are closed. *
