Legal aspects of your online course business with Nuzayra Haque - Ep. #37
Feb 08, 2022
Launching an online course and growing your online teaching business comes with a need to learn about legal aspects and how to protect your work and how to limit risks.
In this interview with Nuzayra Haque, a US attorney specialising in legal matters for course creators, we dive into a number of aspects relevant to course creators.
Key topics and takeaways
- Intellectual property - how to protect your work from getting stolen
- There is international recognition of copyright but laws are territorial
- When your creative work is in a tangible format, copyrights are attained
- For the US, it's recommended that you register your copyright - and you need that in case you need to file a lawsuit later
- Register your copyright at https://www.copyright.gov/
- Contributors to your work must be accredited if you don't have any written agreement saying otherwise
- Request a copyright transfer agreement from all contributors to your work
- If you hire freelancers on a 3rd party platform, check the transfer is included in the platform terms of use (they are included on Upwork.com)
- NB: If you are an author, there is a longer version of this part of the interview, you'll want to listen to in the blog post 'How to protect yourself against others stealing your nonfiction book?'
- Privacy policies and data protection
- What is GDPR? GDPR is short for General Data Protection Regulations and is the European Data Protection Law.
- Even non-US based companies need to comply with GDPR
- Data collection includes both information entered by a website visitor in a form, cookies collecting visitor information (IP-addresses) and any information you have in your customer list, email list, use of your course etc.
- Your cookie policy can be separate or part of your privacy policy
- Contracts you need
- Non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to protect personal, sensitive or confidential information.
- Independent contractor agreement tailored to your business. You can probably start with templates provided by an attorney and tweak them. The contract will include information about hours, payment, tasks etc. but also a section that will protect your information and intellectual property rights.
- Terms of enrollment is the foundation for students entering your program. You can make this a mandatory checkbox in the purchasing process so the student automatically accept the terms when purchasing. Your terms must be available on your website.
- Nuzayra Hague offers templates specifically for course creators and also a free guide (links below).
Nuzayra Haque is a virtual attorney based out of Los Angeles, California. Nuzayra counsels U.S. and international clients on obtaining and protecting trademarks and copyrights, branding strategies, IP portfolio management, trade secrets, data protection, GDPR and U.S privacy law compliance and other commercial matters.
Website: http://www.nhlegal.net/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nuzayraesq/
Free guide: https://view.flodesk.
Get the templates: https://mycontracthub.
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