Comments on: Is Displaying all these Legal Agreements legal and ethical?

By: siegler

siegler — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:06:13 +0000

Thanks Tim. Those are excellent points based on longstanding intellectual property doctrine. The difference here is that the documents in question have all been filed with the SEC and are already available online there and with any number of online publishers (just not easily searchable).

We certainly use IP assignment language to avoid these types of IP ownership issues for our own content authors, but in this case it’s fair use and permitted under the SEC/EDGAR filing requirements.

The broader question to me is whether and how lawyers can take use this to their advantage, and what impact, if any, it will have on billing rates or on potentially leveling the playing field for independent practitioners. Thoughts?

By: Tim Rueb

Tim Rueb — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:54:46 +0000

Actually, if you don’t have permission to publish someone’s work then you are unethically distributing someone else’s work as your own. Basically, who pays for the document creation, gets to decode how the document is used, unless the contract states otherwise. This is further complicated by the fact that not all document are created for a corporation are by it’s own employee’s, but often contracted out, with it’s own set of contractual restrictions.

Ethically, you should alway have a “permission to use” contract in place for each document on your site that you did not create yourself. This “permission to use” will also state explicitly how the material may be used, without further permission.