The Web & the Law
The media supplement of The Guardian newspaper recently ran an interesting piece about online copyright.
They reported on the growing tendency of stock photography suppliers to prosecute websites that use their images without permission. As a result, some unlucky firms have found themselves in court and been ordered to pay damages.
In many cases, The Guardian has found that this type of criminality stems not from meanness but from ignorance. The simple truth is that many designers think of the web as one giant, free image library and give no thought to who actually owns all that content!
The campaign by copyright holders to stamp out this 'copy-n-paste' culture is highlighting just how uninformed website managers are about the law and how it applies to the internet. This is quite worrying, given how the web is now being scrutinised so carefully.
For example, ordinary businesses and private individuals are beginning to paying a lot more attention to what happens online than heretofore. This is reflected in the courts, where cases arising from internet disputes are now common. Such cases encompass all types of activity, both criminal (e.g. fraud) and civil (e.g. libel, defamation).
The upshot is that any organisation with a website must do its utmost to keep abreast of the legislation that affects its online operations.
Yet, as The Guardian's investigation shows, many companies are very poor at this.
Part of the problem is that it is hard to know where to start. A lot of firms can't afford to hire a lawyer to review their web activities. As a result, they rely on common sense to avoid acting in an unlawful manner.
This may be fine for websites that are small in scale, but what about one that relies on financial transactions or that hosts a forum in which the public can post messages? The risks here are much greater than for a simple brochureware site and so a far better understanding of legal constraints is required.
For my own part, I have identified a catalogue of core legislation that affects the activities of website management in Ireland. The most prominent of these are listed on page two of this article.
For anyone not based in Ireland, I suggest that the same themes be used as a starting point. Most market-based, democratic societies will have some form of matching legislation to that in operation here. As noted overleaf, these generally encompass:
However, if your website operates in a country with a more restrictive regime, other categories of legislation may apply. The penalties for infringement may also be more severe. A number of firms have found this out to their cost, as illustrated in the famous Yahoo! Nazi-auctions case in France some years ago.
Read on to see a list of the laws that affect website management in Ireland.
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