Internet Law

We deal with a number of emerging and evolving legal issues related to cyberspace and the World Wide Web. Online businesses face these problems every day.

One of most common issues is drafting the oft-ignored user agreement. Many upstart online businesses copy some other site’s user agreement and paste it in their site as their own. There are even lawyers who practice this way.

This can be suicide, especially when your idea for a new Internet venture is innovative. Drafting a proper user agreement requires a deep understanding, not just of law, but of what the planned site and business is actually going to do. That’s why we play with the alpha or beta version of a site and imagine how end users might use or abuse it.

Just as importantly, we monitor this area of law as it quickly evolves. There are plenty of open questions about, for example, how a social networking site’s legal terms of use might be interpreted — questions that haven’t yet been answered by a court.

There are also thousands of evolving issues of law relating to social networking sites, and there will surely be more in the future because we are constantly seeing entrepreneurs in our office with a new social networking business model or tweak.

We have also helped many Internet and e-commerce ventures, as well as content providers, navigate through the many legal, regulatory and compliance issues that can arise. We have represented clients in intellectual property, privacy and defamation disputes that are particular to the Web, and counseled clients on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Communications Decency Act (statutes vital to any Web site and online business).