Make Money Online- the baby steps part 20

We have reached “Make Money Online- the baby steps part 20″ where we will cover some of the legal aspects you need to know about regarding the internet. First of all let´s take a look at internet copyright issues, which is probably one of the most misunderstood areas out there. One of our friends, a very successful internet entrepreneur, likes to say that 95 % of the content on the internet is copied in one way or the other. He may have a point, but isn´t that really the case for a lot of the work we see in real life as well. How many ideas are really truly original? A large portion of the “new” information is simply repackaged and rebranded old stuff. Change a couple of words here, alter a couple of key words there, and package it in a new shiny outfit. There you go, the next “new” thing. This is an unfortunate fact, since the world needs more original thinkers and pioneers. Now, if we look at it strictly from a legal point of view, copying material from another site isn´t really illegal. We would however advice strongly against it, for a number of reasons. One of the reasons it is not illegal is that it is quite difficult to control. Also, since the potential copyright infringements are occuring on a global scale, with a number of different jurisdictions, the legal implications are tricky to say the least. If the US government successfully passes one of the many bills it has pipelined reagrding this subject things might change. But, as the moment, the internet has no legal copyright.

If somebody steals material from your site, the first thing you should do is simply contact the owners of the site. We know plenty of instances where the people in charge were in fact totally unaware of the fact that some of their material was “recycled”. If that doesn´t work however, the best way to stop another site from stealing your material is to file a DMCA with Google. If Google supports your claims, they will remove the other site from their files. Thus, the other site will not be searchable through Google. Considering Google´s monopoly-like market position this would deal a severe blow to the website in question. If the website is american you can simply file a DMCA, and let the law work its magic.

There are some issues that we consider to be troublesome further down the road. There are bots who can rewrite material in innovative ways. While the bots that are available today haven´t been perfected yet, we believe that future updates will take us closer to a situation where robots will be able to rewrite human text, in a structured, logical and readable fashion. Once this happens, we believe the shit will hit the fan, as this will start a massive chain reaction of “copy-paste”-websites all over the globe. We hope we are proven wrong. And we hope that the search engines will find good ways to weed out the bad, allowing the good to continue to prosper. Another problem is the ever-increasing spam. You should protect yourself using the Akismet plugin. And please don´t become a spammer by stuffing links to your homepage in forums, messages, mails, comments and such. You will get bad will and in some instances there might be even worse implications for you.

As far as the other laws go, just act on the internet the way you would act in normal everyday life, and you will be jsut fine. The two most common “mistake” people make on the internet, aside from stealing and republishing other people´s work,  is to badmouth somebody else. This is probably due to the fact that it is so easy to do, and also you get to do it safely tucked away behind the comfort of your computer screen. Well, depending on what has been written, this might well be against the law. Generally speaking, what´s against the law in real life should be avoided on the internet as well. This is not rocket science, it´s more a matter of common sense. Don´t do on the internet, anything you wouldn´t do in real life.

Let´s move on to “Make Money Online-the bay steps part 21″ where we will discuss the difficulties of getting paid on the internet and the different avenues to adress this “problem”. Let´s get on with it!