- Hi everyone, I'm attorney Aiden Durham
with 180 Law Co in Denver, Colorado,
and welcome back to All Up In Yo Business.
(upbeat music)
So if you watched my last video,
you know that we are talking all about online businesses
this week primarily in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
A lot of people are in tough situations
where they're losing their jobs or income
and are needing to find some way to supplement their income
or replace it by working from home
without leaving their houses.
And for the most part
that means some kind of online business.
And so today,
we're gonna talk about one of the most important elements
of starting an online business
or having any online presence
which is terms and conditions for your website.
But before we get into it, please be sure to like subscribe
and share and check the description
for some links to additional information and resources too.
So terms and conditions.
These may also be called terms of use or terms of service,
whatever you call them terms and conditions are
an absolutely necessary piece of documentation
for any website, any business that has any kind
of website needs terms and conditions.
Now you don't need it like it's legally required.
There's no law that specifically
requires a website to have terms and conditions,
but it's still something that's totally very very important.
So what is it?
The terms and conditions is it's your agreement
as the website operator with the visitors of your website,
it's the agreement between the two of you
of what they can and can't do on your website
and what you are offering to website visitors.
Really it governs the entire use of your website.
And the terms and conditions really help to protect
your business and your website altogether.
And then it also helps to protect your website visitors.
So like I said, this is important for every website
and every type of business that has a website,
even if it's just a informational website
where you have info about your services
and your contact information.
If that's all your website is
you still really need some terms and conditions
for your website.
And then as we move forward from that,
if it's a blog if you're operating a blog
or if you're selling products or services
or selling a online course,
or an online membership, online subscriptions,
then the terms and conditions need to get a bit more
in depth and a bit more detailed,
because of what your website users
are gonna be doing on your website
and how that interaction with your website is gonna go down.
So there are a few common things that pretty much
every terms and conditions is going to include.
The first is gonna be just information about the website
and the business that's operating it.
So, you know, you wanna say welcome to such and such website
operated by such and such business.
Here's our contact information,
these terms and conditions govern your use of our website.
That's a pretty common like introductory paragraph
for terms and conditions.
It's just letting people know hey,
you've landed on our website,
and in order for you to use it
here are the things that you're gonna agree to.
And so going into that,
another big part of the terms and conditions is
permitted use of the website.
What can your users do on the website?
Like who's allowed to access your website.
It's pretty common to give a age restrictions due to
privacy requirements.
It's pretty common to say something like
the people under the age of 16 or under the age of 18,
aren't permitted to use this website
and shouldn't be using it.
And then other permitted uses would be like,
what kind of content the users can upload
if you have a blog and you permit comments.
What kinds of things can they comment on?
If it's a membership site
where there's like a message board
and people can upload or share things,
what kinds of things can and can't they share or upload?
And then related to your content on the website,
the terms and conditions will usually have
some restriction about,
you know, you can't download and copy our content
or our photos, or, you know, the copy on our website.
So this part really helps to protect your content
on the website and the stuff that you're putting out there
so people don't just, you know, copy and paste
or forward your content to somebody else.
If you are operating some kind of a subscription
or a membership site
where people have to log in to get access,
then your terms and conditions should cover that too.
Like what the payment requirements are
and then any access requirements
for setting a login name and password,
and steps that the users should take to
keep their security and privacy of their account,
and any other terms related to
what's needed for the user to access that content.
Another really important element of the terms and conditions
for an online business or website
is limitations of liability.
Now exactly how the limitations of liability looks
is gonna vary because not every state treats
waivers of liability and things like this in the same way.
But generally you're gonna be limiting your liability
so that if let's say you operate a blog
or some kind of informational website
where you give some advice or information to people,
if someone sees that information and runs with it
and has a bad result, they might try to sue you
because of it because they took your advice
or your information from your website,
and it didn't work out from them.
So the limitations of liability
can help to avoid that kind of a situation.
And then they'll also include some kind of a disclaimer
or a liability limitation related to any third party links
or applications that are on your website.
So again let's say you're operating a blog
and you have linked to other products or other services
that you really enjoy.
If one of your website visitors clicks that link,
signs up for that service that you discussed
and that service doesn't do a good job,
that person may try to come back and sue you because of it.
So again, this disclaimer and limitation of liability,
is gonna make it clear that
you as the website operator, aren't liable or responsible
for what your website visitors do
if they interact with your links
or if they interact with other applications on your website.
And then the final little bit of info
that needs to be in your terms and conditions is
some information about privacy.
Now you need whereas terms and conditions
are actually needed,
you do need a privacy policy.
And I'm gonna talk about that on tomorrow's video.
So make sure you check back for that.
But once you got your privacy policy
you wanna reference it in your terms and conditions.
Just so when people are reading
through the terms and conditions
they know that there's this other agreement concerning
what's gonna happen when they interact with your website.
And so now that we know what's important to be included
in the terms and conditions, why does it matter?
We know that this is an agreement
with the people who visit your website
and we know what we're trying to accomplish,
but like why?
What's the goal with the terms and conditions?
Number one, it prevents any kind of abuse of your website.
So it helps to prevent people hacking into your website
or trying to reverse engineer any element of it.
It prevents people from posting offensive comment.
If you have comments enabled
or if there is user generated content,
it makes sure that they're not posting, you know,
offensive language or offensive photos or like that,
which could in the end come back to bite you
as the website operator.
It also of course protects your intellectual property
and your content, all of the photos on your website,
the copy, any downloadable content,
any content on your website, you know, it belongs to you
and you are letting people use it temporarily
while they're accessing your website.
So these terms and conditions helps to protect
the extent to which your users can interact with
and use the intellectual property on your website.
And then it gives you more control
over the access of your users.
This is especially important
if you have some kind of a membership
or something where people have to log in
to access your content.
These terms and conditions
let you set forth how you control their user accounts.
So it allows you to terminate a user's account
if you need to, if they are posting something
that they shouldn't be able to
or it lets you suspend an account
if they're not paying their fees.
If this stuff isn't written out in an agreement,
it's gonna be really hard to enforce.
So the terms and conditions for your membership site
or your website are gonna be that spot
where all of that is set forth of how you can control
whether or not someone is able to use
their user account on your website.
Of course, as we discussed it lets you limit your liability.
So you're not getting in legal trouble
because of the information on your website
or information that you link to on your website.
And then lastly, a little bit of a benefit is that
it lets you designate the law
and potentially the jurisdiction that's going to apply.
So if there is some legal issue,
you can say in your terms and conditions that
the law of this state is going to apply
and any legal issues will be handled
in the state of its jurisdiction.
So it gives you some reassurance
that your terms and conditions are going to be analyzed
in accordance with the law of your state.
And that's typically what you'll want to put is
the state where you're in
or the state where your business is organized.
But so it lets you determine which laws are going to apply
if a legal issue does arise.
So like I said, terms and conditions
are totally important for every website,
regardless of the nature of the website or what it's doing.
It's important for every website,
but exactly what's going to be included in it
and exactly what the terms and conditions needs to say,
is gonna be completely dependent on the business
and the website itself and what it's offering.
That's all for this episode folks,
be sure to check back tomorrow
to learn about privacy policies
and why those are super important
for your online business too.
If you missed yesterday,
go back and check out that video
where we talk about how to start an online business
without leaving your house
and types of businesses that you can start.
Thank you all so much for watching,
I'm Aiden Durham, and I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)