Good morning, Part of my companies investor relations website is a blog. The contents are the thoughts and ideas of an employee at the company. It is merely intended to provoke thought, it is not intended to be definitive financial advice. Our concern is someone taking the advice and making a potentially poor decision with it, or just someone looking for a way to leverage it against us. The question I ask is this: is there some way to safeguard us against any potential problems? Is a disclaimer needed before entering the blog page? Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance.
A link to a disclaimer in the footer of every page would suffice. For legal reasons (just to keep your butts covered) you could claim that the views of individual employees are not necissarily those of the employer etc and so on. There are a lot of sites out there that sell professionally created disclaimers, at a pretty penny of course. But there does not seem to be a site (that I could find) that gives you a how-to or even lays out a guideline on how to write a proper disclaimer. Though in all honesty, as long as you state somewhere on the blog/site that the views are not those of the company's or something in that context, you are fine. When in doubt, contact a local lawyer with intellectual property law experience. p.s. Here's another bit of info that may be of interest to you. The physical place you host your website is bound by the law of the country it is in. If your blog/site was hosted in the USA then it is bound by the laws of THAT country. Put another way, if the site/company you buy website hosting from is physically located in the USA, then so too is your site.