At a Glance:
Operating as individual.
Registering a company. (Why and When?)
Copyright issues.
Other considerations: Privacy policy, Security, Disclaimers, Taxation, Legality.
When to incorporate?
One of the best things when starting a business online is that you don’t need to register a company right away. Most of the online business models give you the freedom to fully operate your websites and get your earnings as an individual. That is the case in the most countries in the world.
As you revenue grows you may decide to incorporate in order to manage you business more efficiently, like engaging business partners, hire employees, manage the costs of the business, get a merchant account at the bank and so on.
Anyway, some web business models, for example an e-shop, might require that you register a company right away if you want to accept credit and debit cards as payment method since it is the most widely used payment method by the internet users.
Since registering a company requires some finances the best advice here is to postponed the legal registration of your online business until it is necessary from legal and practical reasons. Even in the case of online store, you may decide to accept payments via Paypal only or use some other service that allows individuals to accept banking cards when selling online.
Copyright issues.
Every website needs content, a lot of content. The content may include text articles, images, audios, videos etc. Many internet users assume that everything they can find online can be reused on their sites, but it is not like that. Any resource you find online (and you didn’t created it), you can not simply put it on your website, unless you have permission to do so.
If you don’t want to get in some legal trouble when you operate a business stay away from content that you didn’t pay for or that is not copyright free. Anyway there are many free resources online you can still use but some might require to give credit to them (quote the source or the author) if you want to use them on your website.
You also have to be aware that other internet users can steal your original content too. In such cases you should be prepared to protect your legal rights.
Other important issues:
- Privacy policy,
- Disclaimers,
- Online security,
- Taxing,
- Legal, semi-legal and illegal business.
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Summary:
- You don’t need to register a company right away.
- You can fully operate as an individual.
- Reasons to register (early): engage partners and employees, ask for financing, get merchant account.
- Copyright issues:
- Don’t use images (and other materials) if you don’t have the rights,
- Protect your own work.
- Take care of the Privacy policy and Disclaimers.
- Get informed on Online security (yours, your clients’ and your website visitors’)
- Check the taxation regulations in your country.
- Check the legality of your business idea (globally and locally)
Tasks:
- Make a online research for the issues that concern you the most.
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