side from design, functionality and user friendliness, one has to pay attention to legal aspects when creating a new website. If you want to avoid expensive legal difficulties, you should be familiar with the basics of website laws.
DISCLAIMER: this is not a legal consult. We merely list important information but can’t go into specific details and abnormalities. If you have specific questions regarding website laws, a lawyer for media and entertainment law can help you.
1. 1. Don’t forget the legal notice/impressum
The legal notice informs the website users quickly and easily who is running the site.
The legal notice should include the following information:
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Company name and address
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Name of the company’s CEO
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Contact details such as telephone, fax and e-mail
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Info regarding the regulatory authority
(if your offered service requires the authorization of a public authority) -
Register of companies and associations
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Place of jurisdiction
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Sales tax identification number
There are plenty of websites that help you generate a legal notice. Please notice that that is only one of multiple possibilities. If you have any specific questions, you should contact a lawyer for media and entertainment law.
2. Is your content legal?
The internet is full of texts, pictures, graphics and logos. It’s very easy to save them and use them for one’s own website. Nonetheless, all of this content, despite being available and accessible to all, are copyrighted and belong to someone else. The creator of said content has put time, effort and possibly money into the creation of it. Content therefore can’t be used or copied without written authorization by the rightful owner. Even if Google Images and Wikipedia deliver great results in seconds, you are not permitted to use them for your own purposes. Doing so is prosecutable and can results in injunctive relief and compensation claims.
3. Data security
Almost every website saves the personal date of their customers these days. Data privacy statements but state, which services are used to save this data. Possible services are e. g. Google Analytics, social media buttons, newsletter registration forms, …
You can have a data privacy statement created for your site online and for free. Please note that you might need to list additional information, depending on which services and plug-ins your website uses.
4. Limitation of liability / external links
As website owner, you should think about your limitation of liability for external links and the connected foreign content. To minimize legal risk, you can use a disclaimer.
Whether the publication of such a disclaimer protects you from legal consequences, however, is debatable. The Hamburg regional court has released a verdict saying that a generic disclaimer for content that is linked, does not suffice.
5. General terms and conditions, cancellation policy
If you have an online shop, you also need to add a series of additional info, particularly a cancellation policy and general terms and conditions. Attention: this might also apply to classic advertisement pages!
Do you already have all legal information on your site? Check your information again to make sure you’re on the legal safe side.
Do you have any specific questions regarding one of the above mentioned aspects? Here are a few lawyers in Kaiserslautern that have specialized on media law. Of course you can also contact your lawyer.
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