RE: UKNM: Meta Tags?

[Melanie BEECH]

>What if your site is personal, and as such un-copyrighted?


Katie Jones

www.katie.com <-- yes that one.


If the content of your site is original, you own the copyright on it.  Also,

as a personal web site, it reflects directly upon you, your personality and

your reputation.  The first thing you can do is ensure that you have a basic

copyright notice in evidence on the site, which can be used to deter

unauthorised use of your domain name, content etc, as well as to form the

basis of a copyright infringement case.  At this point you can politely

request that the offending site remove the tags as they are in breach of

copyright.  After that, see whether the site which has included your domain

name or any other personal reference to yourself has done so in such a way

as to damage your reputation.  The most obvious infraction here would be

libel.  If they still refuse to remove the tags after you point this out to

them, find out who's hosting them and email them with a quick reference to

*that* demon case.


I suspect this point has not been thoroughly tested in law yet, but even if

there is no explicit libel, if the content of the site were, for example, to

contain offensive material of some description, you could probably argue

that this would reflect badly on you and damage your reputation if people

had been looking for your site in the first place, and thus force them to

remove the offending tags.


Bit vague, I'm afraid - anyone got anything more concrete?


m



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