Setting Up A Streaming Subscription Site, Part 1
Introduction
So, you’ve got a ton of compelling content and you’re looking for a way to make a buck off it. In the following tutorial, we’re going to tell you everything you need to know to change your free site to a paid subscription model. The meat of the feature will focus on selling "soft" goods, i.e., video clips, software, or downloadable documentation of some sort, and we’ll talk briefly about some of the issues surrounding the sale of hard goods.
The four major issues you need address about before you launch your paid site are:
Liability: What are you legal obligations to the consumer? What happens if a consumer in Maine wants to sue you in his state, but you live in California? We’ll tell you how to protect yourself.
Payment method: How do you handle the cash transaction? We’ll tell you about the payment systems that are currently available and give you the pros and cons of each.
Protection: How do you protect your content from being stolen, or vandalized by a hacker? We’ll go over the security precautions you can take secure your site.
Tracking: It’s not enough to have good content on your site, you constantly have to be updating it or your users will stop coming back. In this section, we’ll tell you how to set up a tracking system that follows your users from the time they log in to the time they leave and then let you give them a heads up when you have new content on the site. With that, let’s get down to business.
Liability: Or, how do I protect myself from getting sued.
First and foremost, you are now selling a product. As such, you have moved into the realm of a service provider. Where before you could allow people to download content from your site pretty much without worry or risk you now have certain responsibilities, because you are asking for money in exchange for your product.
Your liability issues are more limited with soft goods; restricted pretty much to the damage that your software may do to the host machine when installed. For your own safety, we recommend you thoroughly test your products in the full variety of environments in which they may be installed. This means testing the install procedure, the removal procedure, and whether any artifacts are left over after installation and removal on a variety of hardware and software platforms.
Given that you have exercised reasonable thoroughness in testing your product and are satisfied with the results your next step should be to develop a software liability waiver – an End User License Agreement (EULA).
Most people never read these EULAs. These days they appear whenever you want to download some bit of software from the Web (a good example is WinZip). When you visit a site that protects its content with a EULA you are taken to a Web page that you must read and the terms of which you must agree to before you may download the software. You signify your acceptance of the terms by clicking on a submit button. In the event that you didn’t do this at download time you will most likely be asked to do this during the install process.
If you read the fine print (and you should), you will realize that you ARE NOT BUYING the software. You are buying a LICENSE (hence the term EULA) to use the software on your machine. The key phrase, drawn from Microsoft’s EULA for Windows 98 Second Edition is "The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is licensed, not sold."
A typical EULA will have provisions covering Termination (you have to destroy your copy of the software if the manufacturer asks you to), Reverse Engineering (you cannot figure out how it works), Copyright (the software is copyrighted), Product Support (the software product IS NOT supported by the manufacturer), Limited Express Warranty (the software is guaranteed to work for only 90 days), and two key sections: Customer Remedies (which limits the customer’s remedies to either replacement of the software or return of the purchase price), and No Liability for Consequential Damages (limiting the manufacturer’s liability to solely the cost that the customer paid for the software).
As you can see a EULA has become common for a very good reason. Basically, you can absolve yourself of virtually all responsibility and liability for the performance of your software. It should be said that the degree of protection it offers is going to be a factor of how vigorously you defend yourself if you ever find yourself in court.
Should you be streaming content (we hope that many of you are) a EULA should provide pretty good protection. You’ll need to be sure of two things: (1) that you only stream content to which you have the rights (make your contributors sign something affirmatively stating that they own the content/rights to the content they provide to you), and (2) that you disavow any responsibility for the consequences of your users installing software to view your streamed content.
Page 2: Model EULA after major corporations >>