The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators

Sarah validates and launches her course

Sarah has an awesome idea for a course. She's learned how to create her course, she's tested the market and pre-sold her course to a bunch of people, she's mastered the tech, she's written and recorded her modules or lessons, she's sorted her sales page, and she's on her way to promoting her course to her email list and through social media. Launch day rolls around and people start buying Sarah's course. She's super excited to hear the 'ding!' of incoming email telling her she's sold her course to Jane, to David, to Rachael...

But then a few things happen

Sarah learns that a competitor is copying some of her newly-created course content.
Next, the owners of some images and videos she used for her course tell Sarah she's infringing their copyright, and then YouTube and Vimeo take down some of her videos.
An unhappy customer who hasn't achieved the results he expected threatens to sue, alleging that Sarah has given negligent advice.
And then, just when she thinks things can't get any worse, Sarah receives emails from angry would-be customers, telling her she's breaching privacy and anti-spam laws!

The joy Sarah experienced upon launch quickly turns to panic: "How could things have gone so wrong, so quickly?!", she asks herself.

Sarah is experiencing these things, and this panic, because she didn't think about the legal stuff before launching her course. She didn't take steps to protect her own content. She didn't understand what she can and can't do with other people's content. She didn't learn how to add statements to her website or course that substantially reduce the risk of being sued. She didn't appreciate the importance of having her own terms of use. And she didn't know about applicable privacy and anti-spams laws and how to comply with them.

Any course creator who doesn't think about the legal stuff could find themselves in Sarah's shoes. They could experience one or more of the things she's facing. But it doesn't have to be that way, because you're able to take a range of steps to avoid that, quickly and without it costing the earth. That's where The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators comes in. It enables you to put legal controls in place quickly and with a minimum of fuss. If you want to learn more about the law in certain areas, you can, but that's up to you. The key goal is to get your legal controls in place, quickly, so you can launch your course without worrying about legal collapse.

The 5-Step Legal Plan is designed for course creators in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

You'll get access to a protected members site where we explain the 5 legal steps and tell you how to implement them

You'll generate your own copyright statement for your course materials so your students and would-be competitors are on notice that they're not allowed to copy your stuff

You'll learn what you can and cannot do with other people's written content, images, music, and video, so you don't unwittingly infringe their copyright and find yourself up ship creek

You'll get your own customised disclaimer and know where to put it, so your students understand you're not promising the earth, and that you're not forming a particular kind of relationship with them

You'll get your own customised privacy statement and know where to put it, enabling you to comply with legal privacy statement requirements and foster greater trust on the part of your students

You'll get your own customised terms of use and know how to get your students to agree to them, giving you a range of rights and protections and enabling you to manage legal risk properly

And you'll learn how to collect people's email addresses properly, saving you from breaching anti-spam laws and privacy laws and avoiding run-ins with angry customers and regulators.

Enter your bullet points here..

The 5-Step Legal Plan is the creation of Richard Best, a lawyer who has been working on the legal stuff for 25 years, first as a litigator and then as a technology, public and commercial lawyer, in both in-house and law firm roles. He has practised law in three countries and been exposed to the laws of many more. His practice sees him getting deeply involved in matters relating to technology, contracting, intellectual property, privacy, and social media, to name a few. He's a lawyer that gets into the trenches too, having created his own blogs, ebooks and audiobook, his own and others’ websites, online contract generation tools, an online privacy toolkit, and his own course. You're in safe hands.