I’ve posted it here initially, but I may well move it in due course. If so I will leave a clear link and explanation in this post.

I appreciate that what follows might not embody an approach relevant to all organisations.

• breaking the law (copyright, for example);
• breaking a contract (a website’s terms of service, for example).

Accessibility

We have a legal duty to ensure our services are accessible to disabled users, which by implication includes websites. There are no specific requirements for websites; as far as I know there have been no significant test cases yet, but groups such as the RNIB have been active in trying to force such a case.

The important thing is to be mindful of accessibility issues when commissioning and managing websites, and to understand the implications of – and be able to justify – your site’s accessibility measures.

• Disabled access to websites under UK law (out-law.com)
• Web Accessibility And The Law (ictknowledgebase.org.uk)

Data protection

When collecting personal information from someone (eg for sending marketing emails) you must be able to show that they were made fully aware that they were giving consent and that they did so actively (as opposed to passively).

A common way to do this is to offer a box that the user ticks to say they are happy for you to send them emails (as opposed to a ready-ticked box that they must un-tick in order not to receive emails).

You must also provide an ‘unsubscribe’ option in every newsletter and marketing email.

Records of those who have unsubscribed should be kept so that they are not accidentally contacted again (unless they explicitly give their consent to be).

Whatever means you use to collect and store data must comply with the Data Protection Act.

• Email marketing – when to use opt-in and when to use opt-out (out-law.com)
• Best Practice For Sending Email Newsletters (ictknowledgebase.org.uk)
• Data Protection (out-law.com)

Intellectual Property

Don’t use anything you don’t have the right to use. Always check licences, copyright and terms of use for anything you re-use (eg text, photos) regardless of where you find them.

For example, images on Flickr are not free for anyone to re-use: by default the owner has copyright control of them, and in many cases the images will have been released under a Creative Commons licence.

• Intellectual property in websites: ownership and protection (out-law.com)

Moderation

This is somewhat counter-intuitive. If you hold comments in a moderation queue in order to vet them, you are deemed to be their creator: legal responsibility for their content is transferred from the original author to you.

Current popular advice is to allow all comments to be published, but operate a solid complaints procedure: include a ‘Report this’ link in each comment and respond swiftly (within 48 hours) when you receive a complaint.

You should check the comments regularly.

• Moderation, liability and terms of use (out-law.com)

Contracts

Whenever you accept terms and conditions for a website or service, you are entering into a contract. If you are using that service in any way for work, you are responsible for that contract on the organisation’s behalf.

Read before you sign up

It’s laborious, I know, but always read through the terms before you agree to them.

Record

Keep a record of those terms of service that you have agreed to, as well as the links to them. This makes it easier for us to remedy any situation that might arise.

Remember

Even if you don’t tick a box explicitly to accept terms and conditions, you are still bound by a website’s terms while visiting it or using content on it.

Terms of use

Use our Terms of Use [link], not someone else’s (such as the BBC’s), as the basis for your own. Ours were written for us, other people’s were not. Our Terms of Use are not set in stone, we can always amend and adapt them as necessary.

Our Terms of Use include rules for posting to our website [link].

Further information

• Moderation, liability and terms of use (out-law.com)
• Legal guides from law firm Pincent Masons (out-law.com)
• ‘Legal Issues’ on lasa’s Knowledgebase (ictknowledgebase.org.uk)
• Data Protection Act explained (ico.gov.uk)
• Disability Discrimination Act explained (direct.gov.uk)

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There is a lot of this information littered around the Internet, but I want a simple list of key points with links to further information that I can share with people; so I thought I’d try crowdsourcing it.

I’ll put this into a wiki eventually.

I’ll start it off:

• Post-moderated forums
  The act of moderating comments transfers legal responsbility for their content to the site host
  http://out-law.com/page-7841#Moderatedsites

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It’s very depressing to hear of the crippling situations people repeatedly find themselves in, simply through a determination to get at the truth in the face of power and wealth that’s determined to stop them. The heartening bit I suppose is that sometimes there are also powerful people prepared to join in the fight.

Problems faced by people in the room had included: unfounded but effective demands to have comments removed from websites; moral dilemmas about balancing legal rights to publish with social implications for individuals; threats of crippling legal action.

Some tips from the room

• Make interaction/commenting guidelines clearer
• Always check your story with more than one source
• Consider remove first-post moderation: if you moderate comments you are legally responsible for their content. Instead add a ‘report this comment’ button and ensure you have a tight take-down policy
• Don’t hold the website in your own name but set up a limited company, so that you’re only liable for the amount that the company is worth. However you must make sure that all content is transferrable to other websites and under your personal control.
• Ensure you have clear terms and conditions are on your site, and review them regularly.
• Ignore the majority of threatening letters from lawyers: most of them are just trying to scare you.

Please remember:
This post is a report of information from other people at a conference. Therefore I may unintentionally have misunderstood or misrepresented what I heard. Please do not treat anything here as fact: check with a reliable source before, say, putting yourself in danger of defending a libel case.

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It’s a curious (albeit pretty boring) question: because the network owner would, I suspect, presume that their wifi name is confined to the privacy of their home. Whereas in fact it is visible to anyone with the right device who happens to be looking, regardless of whether or not it’s a private network.

I know not the answer. If you’re a legal bod and you can clear this up, please do: you’ll help me sleep.

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“The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open license for data and databases which includes explicit attribution and share-alike requirements.

“This license, the first of its kind, is a major step forward for open data. There are currently very few licenses available suited to data and databases and none which provide for share-alike (existing share-alike licenses such as the GPL, GFDL and CC By-SA are all unsuitable for data).”

Visit Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 Released

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Visit Harvard professor says downloading is 'fair use'

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This is of course the story that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has effectively been banned in Australia because of hidden sex scenes, which can be unlocked by the player.

So it’s OK to play at stealing cars, running drugs and bludgeoning people to death, but not procreating?

At a time when there are fears of rising violent crime and growing concerns of ‘inadequate’ sex education (in the UK, at least), making violence acceptable and sex taboo seems particularly perverse.

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