Stay Out Of Legal Hot Water By Handling These Four Issues Correctly

Online retailers have to know a lot about their product

, about website development, about marketing, about shopping carts and payment gateways, and about legal issues. That's right, there are a number of legal issues that you must be aware of and handle properly to avoid problems.

Advertising Trademark Infringement

This problem may or may not be an issue for your website. The problem occurs when you use the trademark or logo of another company without their permission. This may not be an issue when you are selling a company's products they have given you permission to advertise. However, some companies have very strict criteria for how their logos are used or handled. For example, a company may not want their logo used in any way that distorts the dimensions of the logo or may not want their logo used anywhere except directly in conjunction with their products. Check with your wholesaler about any restrictions.

Here is a different scenario. Say a branded website's blogger gives your product a positive review and you want to show that positive review on your site and display that website's logo on your site to show that your product has been endorsed by the site's reviewer. Do not do it unless you get permission and do not expect to get it. Most branded companies want to carefully control their logo to keep the branding pure.

Data Retrieval

You access sites and retrieve information for use on your site, contrary to the terms of use of the site you are accessing. This is an especially big issue with competitors.

It is very tempting to review your competitors' sites and borrow excellent product descriptions or content to spice up your own site. Obviously, there are copyright issues with any outright use of others' materials. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, businesses have a right to protect website content, whether or not it has been registered. In fact, there are companies that can be commissioned to search competitor websites for possible infractions.

One company in this niche offers special algorithms to scan the Web for replication of a company's digital content, including recognizable components of it such as titles, text, layout or design and scan website code to ensure that they are not illegally using trademarks, product or brand names to misdirect online business.

Data Integrity

If you collect personal information about your customers such as address, telephone number and so on, you must employ measures to keep the information confidential and you must follow whatever privacy policy you have posted on your site. Breaches of confidentiality can leave you open to an FTC regulations violation or to a civil suit for breach of agreement. The message is, if you are handling confidential information, pay attention to security and privacy issues.

Vicarious copyright infringement

Vicarious means copyright infringement based on your association with someone who has violated copyright. This can happen if you allow people to post on your site and one of your posters infringes on copyright by posting something on your site that has been obtained in violation of copyright. You need to 1)establish a policy that prohibits this way of using your site, 2) be on the lookout for problem postings, 3) and remove anything suspicious. If you do those three things, you have made enough of a good faith effort to be protected.

by: Jane Dawson

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