Protecting Your Mobile App IP: The Mini Missing Manual

Infringement: What You Can Do About It

The sad fact is that there are a lot of sleazy characters out there. If you’re unlucky, one of them might decide to steal parts of your app and claim it as his own. The whole point of registering your copyright is to protect you in case that happens. The technical term for this kind of app-swiping is infringement.

How can you be sure that someone has infringed on your copyright? The answer depends on three factors:

• Is your work protected by copyright? In order for you to copyright an app, you have to create it independently (in other words, you can’t steal parts of it from anyone else), it has to show some creativity, and has to be fixed in some way (for example, saved to a hard drive).

  Remember that copyright doesn’t protect ideas, so you can’t stop someone from coming up with an idea similar to yours. So if your app teaches people Karate moves, that doesn’t mean no one else can create an app that explains the same thing, just that they can’t express that information in substantially the same way you do. But if the other app has audio, visuals, or text that’s really similar to your app, you may have a legitimate infringement claim.

• Did the infringer copy the work? If the person won’t admit that they copied your app, you need to show two things:

  • The infringer had access to your work. Sometimes this is easy to prove—for example, if you sent the other party a link to your app and you have a copy of the email. In other cases, you may need to use a ...