Need help before creating an ecommerce website

[zarkoth76]

Hi
I know you're busy so I'll try to be brief
I'm in the UK and want to start a website that will sell information (some of that I have compiled and organised from the public domain and some are summaries of widely published guidelines)
1) Are cyberlaws the same all over the world?
2) Do I need to register/patent or whatever the information I will sell or can anybody copy and reuse as they please (since it essentially derives from public domain)?
3) I am planning to offer a non satisfaction money back guarantee. Does this need any special legal considerations?
Thank you in advance

 

[Michael Wechsler]

The answers to your questions are:

1) No. Laws are not the same all over the world, especially cyberlaw, and in many instances there might not be laws addressing certain issues of the Internet specifically that make things clear.

2) The law you would be concerned with is "copyright" - part of "Intellectual Property" law. What you would want to register is your "compilation" of the information. If the information is in the public domain than, by itself, you can't have protection against people copying the information. But if you did something special with the data that is not usual and specialized, it might be able to be copyrighted. It's all depended upon what you have and what you did.

3) Hard to tell you what legal requirements you may have without more. If you're doing a money back guarantee, just make sure you clearly spell out the limits to what "satisfaction" means. Anyone can use the information and then send you a notice saying "I wasn't satisfied" and then you're in a bad place. You may want to think about putting some guidelines as to what consitutes the guarantee, e.g. they have to provide a reasonable reason, it has to be in from no more than X days from the date of purchase, the time it will take to receive money back will be at least X days and no more than Y, etc. Important to consider is also chargebacks to credit cards, which can present a bad situation for you.

Best of luck to you.