Founding Partner
Your IP Rights on Your Website Created with Squarespace
By Steven Frydman
Steven Frydman is a rising third-year J.D. Candidate and Law Student at Benjamin L. Cardozo School of Law. He is primarily interested in Intellectual Property Law and has interned at Gearhart Law for the summers of 2021 and 2022.
Many entrepreneurs are using popular online tools to help them create websites for their fledgling businesses. As Intellectual Property lawyers whose goal is to protect your rights and help you grow your businesses, it is important to us that you know what your rights are when creating websites with these services.
In short, your rights depend mostly on the contract you sign when you work with services like Squarespace. You may not think you did sign a contract with these services, but when you click ‘I accept’ to those Terms of Use or Terms of Service, you bound yourself in contract! Many people do not read these documents, so we analyzed them for you.
Your IP rights with Squarespace websites can be found in Section 2 of their Terms of Service: “Your Content.” Section 2.1 guarantees that all content you post to your site, like any text, photos, music, videos, etc. remain your intellectual property. However, this comes with the explicit license you give to Squarespace in Section 2.2 that they can use that content for the purposes of ‘providing, improving, promoting, and protecting’ their services. This includes giving Squarespace the right to feature your website and content on their pages to promote their services.
Perhaps most important is Section 8 of the Terms of Service: “Copyright,” which incorporates Squarespace’s Copyright Policy. This policy describes the process that allows a person to submit a claim that a website created with Squarespace is infringing on their Copyright. If you believe that someone else is infringing on your copyright, simply follow the steps in the policy, identifying your Copyright and the alleged infringing material, and email Squarespace. Squarespace then has the sole discretion to decide whether to suspend the website, and they very often will. On the other hand, if a Copyright claim has been submitted against you, you should submit a Counter-Notification as soon as possible. First you must remove the alleged infringing content from your site, and if the copyright claimant does not take legal action within 10 days of you filing your counter, Squarespace may return that content and your website. But in doing so, Squarespace has you agree to submit to jurisdiction in Federal Court for the judicial district nearest your address if the copyright claimant wants to take legal action (international users submit to jurisdiction in New York county).