Whether this is a new decade or not, there is no question that it is a new year. Enter website copyright issues. So we have again my annual copyright post.

You can go here to read the original article, but in short:  “…the year corresponds to the date of creation of the material. Copyright law doesn’t have much to say about exactly how the date works. A range usually represents the idea that some material was created on X date, some on Y date, and some on dates in between. A single date is supposed to represent the idea that all of the material was created on that date.”  Remember, we aren’t lawyers.

So there you have some of the legal issues, but you know, there are other issues, too.  One of the things we learned this year (and always suspected) is that some people really do look at the copyright range to see how long you have been in business.  Bet you never thought your copyright was part of your conversion strategy, eh?

Robbin

This is a story that I hear over and over again from customers (Note: no LunaMetrics customer should feel that I am writing about them. I hear it all the time.)  “Well,” the customer says to me, “We’d really like to add that OnClick event, or that JavaScript snippet, or those text links at the bottom of our page, but the third party vendor will charge us $3000 to do it.”  Yesterday, a potential customer said to me, “I feel, just let me add the stupid JavaScript, I can do it in three minutes for free.”

Third party web application vendors bring a lot of value. They may manage important pieces of your site, and they may have great applications that would cost you a lot of money to create yourself. But before you sign on the dotted line, find out what the upkeep costs will be.  Don’t ever believe that there won’t be upkeep costs. Sure, you’ll be able to do a lot of the work in your CMS, but there will be plenty of architectural (or just JavaScript tags) that you’ll need them to add for you. Get an agreement right up front on how much it costs (and what “it” means, is it hourly, or by the line of code or what?)  The third part deserves to make a profit, I recognize. But once you sign on the bottom line, there is no competition and they can charge you whatever they like. So get it in writing.

Robbin

Here in Italy, where I am pretending to be on vacation (but am really writing in my blog), I see that the law requires the following data to access the internet:

• Date and time of access
• Name and Surname
• Passport number (I actually think any official ID is OK, since I have visited a number of Internet hot spots in Rome and Florence and see others using drivers licenses, etc.)

At some level, this reduced the confidentiality problem. At home, I can just pay money to use an Internet cafe (if I can find one) and no one is the wiser. Here, you might be able to trace me to a specific computer *if* the people who are running the hotspot are really good about making one sign in and assigning customers to a specific computer. The people who are in this Internet cafe business are very good about the record keeping, and those who just have an extra computer that they rent out for two euro per hour are not as exacting. They try.

BTW, Internet time and telephone time are the only two bargains I have found in Italy. (I paid $17.00 for 22 minutes of Internet time, which included a computer, in the Cincinnatti airport. That’s about 14 euros. Seven hours of time in Italy. And you wanted to know how this was about conversion rate, right?)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I love MarketingSherpa. If it weren’t for Anne Holland and Company, I probably would never have ended up in this industry.

And the MS folks have been really good about keeping us marketers on the right side of the law. They did a great job with CAN-SPAM 2003 when it first came out. Not two weeks ago, they did a piece on email marketers who are getting sued for using patent-infringing technology.

So I was really surprised to see this piece on PETCO. It’s a great piece, it chronicles how PETCO made their customer comment section into an important part of their website. I was ready to send it to one of my customers and then suddenly remembered that Amazon received a business process patent for customer reviews, which even included leading customers to a webform to fill out that review.

Whether Amazon is planning to pursue the patent or not, and even if PETCO’s customer review system is outside of the Amazon patent, I thought MarketingSherpa should have pointed out the legal pitfalls. Maybe they will down the road.

Robbin
LunaMetrics