As we begin our journey into cyberspace we tend to focus on the technology of e-business. We find that we pick up many strange partners in our journey, and a very important partner is your corporate attorney.
The first legal issue is one of copyrights. When you put up a Web site you become a publisher. Much of the information you "publish" is proprietary and has value to your organization. You need to protect this information by copyrighting it. Copyrighting is incredibly easy but often overlooked. There is no legal filing process; you simply put the following wording at the bottom of each and every page on your Web site:
Copyright 2001 by (your company name)
This page last updated on January 1, 2001
The date of last update is extremely important and should be automated. I use Server Side Includes (SSI) to maintain the date last modified for my Web pages. You can also obtain the date from Net.Data or JavaScript. The JavaScript method is questionable, as it depends on the date settings on the user's PC. A sample SSI statement would be:
Monday, 08-Jan-2001 19:05:36 EST
You can place your copyright notice in an include file and copy it into every Web page you produce. Don't miss a page. Your corporate legal department can now protect your content. You may give permission to use your material in articles or quotes by requiring that those you give permission to incorporate the statement: "Reprinted by permission of (your company name)."
Be very careful with trademarked or copyrighted images. More on that later.
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About the author: Bob Cancilla is managing director of IGNITe/400, an electronic iSeries 400 Internet users group. He is also author of the book Getting Down to e-business with AS/400).
