Internet offers endless business opportunities and amazing flexibility, yet laws do extend not only to the good old offline ventures, but to e-businesses too and like it or not, they should be obeyed.
The applicable regulations however tend to be neglected sometimes leading to legal vulnerability of the respective business, disputes or simply customer dissatisfaction.
Some of the most common mistakes related to legal compliance of online businesses that I have seen in my practice include:
- The Copy/Paste Sin
Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policy have been copied from the internet and are not fully applicable to the case. In many situations they are not even followed by the business itself.
- Forgetting the Change
Changes in operations and customer service have not been reflected with a respective modification in the Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy or other legal documents. Even changes in the applicable laws are not reflected by the Terms.
- It`s all about the Contract
No written contracts have been concluded with the website developer, content providers, logo designers, etc. to clearly set the intellectual property rights to these works. In case of intellectual property dispute you need to be able to prove two basic things about the disputed work – who created it (i.e. you or someone hired by you) or when was it created (i.e. before the other party is claiming they created it).
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