The business model is providing dentists with a custom designed YouTube Channel, Facebook page, Twitter account , as well as posts for their blog. In addition I would be looking to provide them was a library of Facebook posts for their site. The Facebook posts would be suggestions which they can decide if they want to use. All of this for a low monthly fee. What are the legal issues here?
You need a standar services agreement. The legal issues and terms of your agreement with each dentist client can cover any of the following non-exhaustive deal points:
- How many videos are you posting, and how often? What other social media channels are you handling for this client?
- What is the term of the contract?
- Who pays for cost of production of each video, included in the monthly fee, or separate fee? What about the quality of each video?
- Who owns the intellectual property to the videos and youtube channels which you create for your clients?
- What happens if someone sees your ad for Dentist A on YouTube, goes to Dentist A, is injured by Dentist A, and is now suing Dentist A for malpractice. Are you, as advertiser or marketing firm for Dentist A, liable?
In addition you may want to carefully draft the payment and deliverables schedules in your contract so that payments are coming in without issue, and the schedule for deliverables, rewrites / redrafts and other terms relevant to creative services is included in the agreement to the extent practical.
This looks like homework. Have you ever been in business before? Do you have a budget? A CPA.
There is choice of business entity, copyright, Terms of Use, employment law, contract law fpr the agreement with clients.
Appears to be a law student question.
If you are really an dental marketing website package provider, you would know you have at least the following issues: service contract for dentists to sign, business entity formation, service mark clearance, service mark registration, content clearances (copyright, trademarks, patent), licensing agreement, secrecy agreement (no reverse engineering), copyright registrations, product liability concerns, DMCA considerations, take down procedures, domain clearance and registration and rights of privacy/publicity.
The big legal issue is that to do this an attorney or attorneys would need to be consulted to advise on all the above.
All the attorneys that have provided answers are spot on. There's a variety of issues you need to address to ensure that your venture can get off the ground and has room for takeoff. There's no question you need an attorney, but which one is right for you is a key ingredient. In either case, you want an attorney who understands tech and entrepreneurship, and our business attorneys are also entrepreneurs and have degrees in computer information science, so we can help.
