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Legal

Sad as it may be, web sites should have several legal statements on them. There are usually three main notices that should be included on a site:

Copyright statement - The copyright statement is needed to protect the content of your site from being plagiarised. The main objective is to prevent the content of the site being copied for purposes other than those you intended and it is sensible to stipulate that copies for personal use are appropriate. On the other hand you may want people to copy content from your site in which case you can use the Creative Commons license which allows copying without surrendering all of your rights to the material.

Terms of Use - The terms of use is largely there to make disclaimers and limit your liability. How effective this is may be questionable and it will not remove statutory rights and responsibilities, but it can do no harm. It may also be necessary to state ownership of any trademarks you own or site the ownership of trademarks you refer to but do not own. Those trademark owners may have stipulated that you may only use their names or logos if the ownership is stated.

Privacy Policy - Visitors to sites can be very concerned about their privacy and will want the reassurance of knowing your privacy policy. Any site that remembers user settings or requires any kind of log in will be collecting some information about the visitor. And even if these are not being done the web server itself will be collecting technical statistics about visitors, so it is important that the privacy policy outlines the extent of information collected and how it is used.

We can help tailor the legal notices for your site so that they protect your rights and site and also reassure your visitors that you will not abuse their private information.

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