Woolley & Co E-Zine

Tips and ideas for keeping your business on the right side of the law

Welcome those of you who are hard at work whilst others are sunning themselves on far flung beaches. This months E-Zine has a number of brief snippets of news and tips we hope will prove of interest. There’s some good advice for those who come up with a ground breaking idea and want to protect it and a warning for those who use, or are thinking of using e-mail marketing.

We welcome your feedback – if there is any particular legal issue you’d like to see covered send the details through to marketing@e-lawfirm.co.uk.

Andrew Woolley

Andrew Woolley, Principal, Woolley & Co

Protecting YOUR ideas

You’ve got a great business idea! You decide to meet a consultant to discuss it. Suddenly, you find it is being claimed by another as their idea. Our advice is don’t discuss any new idea with anyone without a good confidentiality agreement (some people call them Non-Disclosure Agreements (“NDAs”). And don’t be embarrassed to get people to sign it - including your bank manager. If people aren’t intending to breach it, what’s the problem with signing it? Woolley & Co can provide Non-Disclosure Agreements for a fixed fee – contact us by email on info@business-lawfirm.co.uk or call Andrew Woolley on 01789 267377. To read more about protecting your intellectual property, design rights, trademarks and patents click here.

Recently in the US (but this may well be the same here) ISPs have been told by courts that, if a holder of copyright claims that another website is breaching their rights, then they can take the “offending” site down without investigating the issue. Whether this becomes a charter for mischievous complaints remains to be seen and we wait to see if the courts move from saying “can” to “must” which would be an easy move for them but a tough one for the rest of us. Our advice is to keep clear evidence that you hold the copyright in all the things on your site…watch out for photos especially if you didn’t take them. If you need advice on copyright issues contact us by email on info@business-lawfirm.co.uk or call Andrew Woolley on 01789 267377. For a more detailed article on Copyright issues click here.

Unsolicited email

From October you cannot send e-mails or even e-zines to people who have not agreed to receive them. Of course sometimes people do forget what they’ve agreed to subscribe to or when they may have given you their e-mail details. So if you use or plan to use e-mail marketing in your business set up robust systems for collecting and protecting data and make sure you have the evidence ready should you be challenged. You can capture e-zine subscribers legitimately through a sign-in page on your website, where visitors can opt to enter their details and receive more information. You can see an example on our website. If you want our award winning web designers to quote for doing the same for you just let us know.

Keeping records needn’t be onerous, even something as simple as putting “e-z” for “e-zine” on the back of a contacts’ business card and keeping it in a monthly envelope would be some help if you were challenged.

To find out more about these and other legal issues visit the Woolley & Co website at www.e-lawfirm.co.uk.

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