Archive for the ‘Legal’ Category
Posted on January 4, 2010 by Robbin
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
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Legal
Posted on November 21, 2008 by 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
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Industry News, Legal
Posted on December 30, 2006 by Robbin
The newspapers are so good about reminding me when it’s time to change my clocks; I thought it was only fair to return the favor and do a copyright head’s up.
Web sites are always changing. If you aren’t always tweaking (or at least adding to) your site, it looks, well, old. It’s also possible that you change your site all the time, but never change your copyright. Either way, that 2004 copyright looks so 2004 as we start to approach the end of the decade.
What’s the real skinny on copyright law? We aren’t lawyers but we know some good ones, and here’s what they told us:
“In theory, 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.”
So, we interpret, if you haven’t changed your site since 2004, that 2004 copyright is just perfect — in the eyes of the law. On the other hand, it won’t do much for your conversion rate (don’t you wonder if sites with old copyrights are still in business?) The best compromise is to be sure to make some changes (and you’ve got a list of changes you’ve been meaning to get around to, right?) and then update your copyright. (No changes in the queue? How about running a link check and then fixing any broken links – presto! you’ve made changes.)
Lots of people have websites where the copyright is part of a template – an “include”. The template gets included on every page, and if you change the copyright for one page, it changes for all of them. What do you do if you have some pages with no changes but others that need an updated date? If we were lawyers, we would argue that a copyright in an include file is a copyright for the whole site, and if part of the site had changes, the whole copyright gets updated. (But we aren’t lawyers.)
You’re sure to find a few pages that don’t have the copyright updated even when the include file gets changed, because that specific page never included the include file. Good candidates for that problem are thank you pages, shopping cart pages, landing pages that have no navigation, and .pdfs. You can decide each on a case by case basis, always keeping in mind that this is a golden opportunity to make those long-awaited changes and then have a wonderful reason to update your copyright.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Legal
Posted on July 5, 2006 by 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
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Legal
Posted on February 20, 2006 by Robbin
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
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Legal
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