Web Site Legal Issues
If you have a web site, beware. Once you stamp out your piece of cyberspace, you’ve not only expanded the reaches of your business, but also your risks. Build a site without considering the legal issues involved, and troubles you never dreamed of could follow.
Should you consult an attorney before taking your business online? If your web page is purely informational, you may be able to unravel pertinent legal issues on your own. But if you sell goods online or host an online forum, legal advice is essential. These are some of the legalities that come into play:
Your Name, Your Domain
The name of your site is your “domain name.” If you choose a domain that is the same or similar to a name used by another business, you could be sued for trademark infringement.
It’s a good idea to hire a commercial search firm to check federal, state and foreign trademarks before registering your domain name. (Try the Sunnyvale Center on Innovation, Invention and Ideas at (www.sci3.com).
Domain names are issued on a first-come, first-served basis. (Network Solutions, one of the sites where you can register a domain name, is at (www.networksolutions.com).
Copyright Issues
If you plan to put photographs or copy from your brochure onto your web site, be careful. If a public relations firm or other independent contractor created the brochure, your rights to use it might be limited to a particular use, such as work in print or distribution in the United States. In most cases, you’ve got to go back and get further license to put it up on the Web.
The same principle holds for music, even if a jingle was written for your company. You might have the license to play the music in the lobby, but putting the same tune on your site requires a whole different license. Make sure you have the rights to put it online.
Copyright law states the author of written material usually owns it. So if you hire an ad agency or consultants to write copy for your web page, they may be considered the authors unless your contract assigns copyright rights for the work to you.
If you turn to a web site designer to help create your Internet presence, your contract should address rights of ownership to content, the look and feel of what is developed, and coding. Consider asking that a copy of the coding be placed with a software escrow agent in case the developer goes out of business and you need to maintain your web site.
Think Like A Publisher
If you have a web site, you’ve become a “publisher” – which means you have to pay attention to libel and privacy issues. Beware of defamatory comments made by visitors to your web site via a forum or bulletin board.
Privacy is also an online concern. You can legally publish embarrassing facts about somebody only if the facts are newsworthy enough to override the right to privacy.
Selling Globally
When you open up shop on the Web, remember you’re hanging a shingle in every city in the world – with a myriad of laws that could apply. That’s why you need a contract on your site that spells out the terms of the sale. Make it clear that any disputes will be settled in your local jurisdiction. Without such a contract, you could end up fighting a suit far away from home, with all the expenses that go along with it.
Copyright 2000 PrintPlace.com, Inc. All rights reserved.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on April 1, 2000
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