Make sure you are familiar with copyright issues in order to avoid liability when publishing content created by others.

"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, signed into law on October 28, 1998, amended the copyright law to provide limitations for service provider liability relating to material online. New subsection 512(c) of the copyright law provides limitations on service provider liability with respect to information residing, at direction of a user, on a system or network that the service provider fcontrols or operaties, if the service provider has designated an agent for notification of claimed infringement by providing contact information to the Copyright Office and trhough the service provider's publicaly accessible website." Source accessed 08 Feb. 2003 at http://www.loc.gov/copyright/onlinesp/.

Example of one website announcement concerning their policy and actions to be taken if necessary:

http://resources.hitbox.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?copyright

For further information:

http://www.loc.gov/copyright/onlinesp/

A local example can be found at Onramp at http://www.onr.com/onr/content.html

As a service provider, MAIN has filed notification papers detailing contact information for potential copyright issues. MAIN notification papers were submitted in 1998 and signed by Red Wassenich as Secretary on the MAIN Board of Directors. The second URL (http://resources.hitbox.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?copyright) leads to this information as well as to the forms that are used to designate an agent to receive information and the amendment forms.

"For purposes of section 512(c), a 'service provider' is defined as a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefor, including an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of mterial of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received."