If you have built a new website or have done a refresh to your old website (to get rid of the website shame you were feeling), congratulations!
A lot of business owners that I talk to have either not focused on the legal requirements for their website or are relying on their web developers or web designers to have included what they need.
Don’t Assume Your Web Person Has Got This Handled
In my experience, most web developers and web designers are focused on the user experience and design of your website, but not the legal stuff. They may pull a template from somewhere, but very few of them customize the website templates for Canadians and for your specific business needs.
So what to do? I’ve got you covered.
Privacy Policy – You are required by law in Canada (PIPEDA and provincial laws) to have a privacy policy when you are collecting “personal information”. Personal Information is any information about an identifiable individual.
Your privacy policy will contain certain information including what information you collect, how you use it and in what circumstances you will share information with third parties (like using third party software). If you are collecting personal data from parties in the European Union, your privacy policy should also comply with the GDPR legislation.
Copyright Notice
To protect the content on your website, you should have a copyright notice to assert your rights in the work. The content can include written stuff like blog posts or product descriptions or photos, videos or podcast episodes.
Your copyright notice is in the form of © + Legal Business Name + Year of Creation. All Rights Reserved. i.e. © Legal Essentials 2021. All Rights Reserved. This serves as a reminder that you own the copyright to the content and others should not use this content (writing – blog posts, product descriptions, photos, videos, podcast audio) without your permission.
For websites where you may publish works over a period of years, you are recommended to use © + Legal Business Name + First Year of Publication – Current Year.
Website Disclaimers
It is important for your Website to have a legal disclaimer for several different purposes.
You should tell your website visitors that you are providing information but not professional advice through your website. You want to make it clear that visitors should not rely upon the information on your website as a substitute for professional advice from someone who understands their situation.
Your disclaimer should be transparent about any compensation that you receive for recommending any products or services. Although not required by law in Canada, your disclaimer may wish to be clear that particular results are not guaranteed and any testimonials or endorsements are not indicative of similar results.
Website Terms of Use
The website Terms of Use bring together the copyright notice, privacy policy and disclaimers and provide other rules for how people can use your business website.
In order to make the text more readable, you can provide hyperlinks to the Privacy Policy and Disclaimers in the main body of the Terms of Use rather than repeating them.
You should define acceptable and unacceptable uses of your website for visitors and give yourself remedies for unacceptable use.
If you are selling goods and services on your business website, your terms of use should also include such commercial contract terms as refund policy, price changes, additional fees etc.
Republished with permission from the copyright owner, Online Legal Essentials Inc. 2021 All Rights Reserved. Website www.onlinelegalessentials.ca