legal issues

copyright - disclaimer - privacy policy

[pardo]

We soon start with a comprehensive web directory. We crawled the web manually to collect a goog collection of links, makes our own description (sometimes for the title we take the title of the web page we link to) and put it in our own special way to present it to our visitors.

I read before that this is under copyright protection. But do i have to register somewhere? does this protect our content worldwide?

Next issue is the disclaimer, how do i start this thing, for we cannot be responsible for the content on other sites that are in our dbase.

And the privacy issue? we will (later on) collect user behaviour data in a cookie or cookieless for having an idea what's going on and where we can improve our website.

Are there 'sample' texts which may be used - copyright free ;) - to have all legal issues covered?

What are youre experiences with this topic?

[jackofalltrades]

I think using site titles for description is ok. I have even used the opening paragraph for the descriptions in my directory. I cant see anyone complaining about that.

The worst that will happen is that they will ask you to remove the listing.

For disclaimers and copyright, I tend to put a line at the bottom of each page saying that nothing on these pages can be used without our express permission, or words to that effect.

This gives you some legal force if anyone steals your content. They cant argue that they thought it was freely available.

Privacy - a page stating clearly (ie not 8pt text! ;)) what data you collect, why you are collecting it, how you do it and what you will do with the information.

Also a statment telling your users you wont share the data helps - but only if you dont share the data! :)

JOAT

[mgream]

Copyright is a statutory right available by default, though it is good practice to put copyright notices on your pages (e.g. in the footer) to make it explicit. You own the copyright in the "collection", even if you are using links/titles that are technically owned by others.

You can use W3C P3P to describe your privacy policy, including use of cookies. There are validators, support with tools (e.g. AT&T P3P Privacy Bird) and IE6.0. P3P is described in XML, and includes references to "human readable" versions of privacy policy.

You can create an explicit "terms and conditions" page that covers your web site. You can see mine at [matthewgream.net...] [please don't copy it, but you may use it as part of your research :-)]. You can refer to this notice from your P3P policies, and from other places on your web site. You need to include jurisdictional issues to cover the world wide nature of WWW. Your disclaimers can easily cover liabilities for "third party content", and state that those that link to you need to follow specific rules.

The legal world has been concerned about how effective these legal notices are, because often they are not made aware to users with enough clarity. I like the approach taken by the EU with their explicit notices on each page(http://europa.eu.int/comm/competition/index_en.html).