Legal Templates and Site Linking: Delegate but understand...

In the eseehow philosophy Principle #3 is Delegate, and Principle #1 (Do It Once) suggests the use of templates; when applied together, they give us the wonderful time-saving concept of using other people's templates.

However, an email I received last night highlights an important point when following this strategy: understand the work that is done on your behalf - it's your name on the label.

The email in question was the kind that every webmaster loves to receive, you know, the ones that say how useful the site is and how they'd like to recommend it to their social network. If that had been the only comment, this blog post would have been very different and I would have missed a lesson, one important enough to share.

The problem lay in a section of The Legal Stuff which states:

• You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without eseehow's prior written consent.

Oh dear! Reading this on its own, I can certainly understand the email author's concern. No tweets, no social bookmarks, no blog entries, publish and be damned ...or so it appears. How can anyone help to promote this site with such an apparently draconian restriction in the T's & C's, and why is it even there?!

First the 'why'... In keeping with the site philosophy, I used the Business Link legal templates, saving much time and expensive legal advice in the process. A few of the documents needed tweaking and of course this meant giving full consideration to what remained but it was still far less time consuming (or perilous!) than writing them myself. So why leave in the restrictive text above?

The main purpose of that line is twofold; the first is to expressly deny a practice known as 'hot linking', the second is to prevent linking in inappropriate contexts. Hot linking is where another site displays images and/or documents from your site in order to save the bandwidth of hosting them on theirs, and doing so without giving credit or asking permission. In the second case, an example of 'inappropriate contexts' is linking by disreputable / illegal websites which may then become associated with eseehow on search engines etc. Not nice.

These are two good reasons to keep control of how people link to your site. It also highlights why it's important to understand what others have created for you - so you can explain when called to account for it later. 

But how can you link to this site without asking my permission every time?

The truth is, I've already given permission to link in several places on the site. Wherever there is a button on a page, this is permission to link to that address and share it with your social network. The Copyright section gives permission to share the content with a few caveats about commercial gain etc. Finally, if you'd like to blog about this site and need to link to the homepage, for example, I've told the Rottweilers to stand down unless they see something defamatory or obscene (they need feeding sometimes!).

I hope that clears it up and you feel comfortable sharing this site with your friends and associates - hey we're even on Facebook and I promise the dogs are in their kennels!

The last thing is to say thanks to the email author for prompting me to share the following lessons:

• Delegate and use templates - but make sure you understand them
• Business Link has lots of templates for small businesses to save them time and money
• Have a site linking policy to deter inappropriate use of your name and your content
• Make sure people know it's okay to share - the internet would be a very lonely place otherwise!

Hope you found this useful - please feel free to share and comment below.