Keep Your Site    on the Right Track

Regulations. If your firm does business internationally or in a regulated industry, you're subject to many different laws and regulations. This is particularly true if your site publicly trades or is involved in areas such as banking, real estate, utilities or pharmaceuticals. A legal audit will review compliance with domestic and international laws on financial transactions, securities, advertising and shipping.
 
Intellectual property rights. There several issues you need to be concerned with:

Copyright. Do you own the copyright to the site? Does a developer or employee own it, or is it jointly held? Your site must display the proper copyright notices, which depend on who owns the copyright. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you must register your site with the U.S. Copyright Office and have a policy for reporting potential copyright infringement on your site. The law provides limited safe harbor protection against unknowingly or inadvertently transmitting, linking to or hosting material that infringes on another copyright. Original content. If your company creates the content on your site, you have First Amendment and other legal protection similar to a newspaper publisher or a company publishing a prospectus or catalog. Still, you need to look at content for accuracy, fair advertising, SEC and other regulatory issues. Also, make sure you take steps to protect your content, including any databases you maintain, by filing patent, trademark and copyright applications. Licensed content. If your site contains written content, graphics, photographs, music or other material that isn’t created in-house, an audit can ensure that you have the proper clearances and rights to use the material. Third party content. Interactivity may be important to your site in the form of e-commerce, e-mails and other ways that let users publish content. A Web site audit can tell you whether you have limited your liability with the proper disclaimers and terms of use. And it can ensure that you have legally required provisions for removing offensive content.

Tags and keywords: An audit looks at your metatags and keywords to ensure there are no potential infringement claims.

Linking and framing: This is unique to the Internet. But you can be held liable if you knowingly link to a site that is infringing copyrights, if you link in a way that infringes on another site's rights, or if your link implies any endorsement by another site.

A related issue “framing,” when one site links to content from another site within a frame on the first site.

 Case example: The Washington Post and other news organizations sued after a site called TotalNEWS framed their content with ads and the TotalNEWS logo and URL. TotalNEWS was selling advertising based on copyrighted material from the well-known news organizations. "By usurping the content," the lawsuit argued, TotalNews "unfairly misappropriated valuable commercial property." The suit was settled in 1997.

A Web site audit can provide guidelines for dealing with complex areas and can identify potential liability before litigation arises. In addition, you will be in the best possible legal position by posting the disclaimers and establishing policies that will help you if a liability claim arises.

But an audit shouldn't be a one-time event. Web sites tend to be dynamic and the laws are constantly changing, so make sure no new potential problems have crept in with periodic reviews.