Buy A Website
The decision to buy a
website necessarily involves a significant amount of
due diligence. You need to know you are actually
getting what you think you are buying.
Buying A Website
There are two general approaches to
developing sites online. The first is to start from
scratch and build something that slowly grows over
time. The second is to short cut the process and buy a
website that has already been up for some time. Many do
this if for no other reason than an "aged" site often
does better in the search engine rankings.
The decision to buy a site necessarily
involves a good bit of due diligence. This is not to
suggest that the selling party is devious per se, but
websites are often built without much thought to
whether the parts can be sold. An example can help show
why.
Would you buy a car that the seller did not
actually own? Of course not. It is a bizarre scenario
if you think about it, but it is one that actually
frequently occurs on the web. How so? It has to do with
a strange twist of copyright law.
Under copyright law, the creator of a work
owns the copyright for it. On the web, this means the
website designer owns the copyright to his designs.
This is true even if a site owner paid the designer to
create the design. If the site owner does not include a
copyright transfer clause in the agreement with the
designer, the copyright does not transfer. If you buy
that site, you are essentially buying a car the seller
doesn't own! Conducting due diligence before hand is
the way to avoid such a problem.
Let's consider another example. You find a
site with a custom social media platform that is simply
amazing. You want to buy the site. A price is agreed
and due diligence is undertaken. A problem quickly
becomes apparent. The site owner had a programmer
create the custom platform, but couldn't afford the
cash flow outlay. To get around this, he and the
programmer took joint ownership of the program and the
programmer has the right to license it to other sites.
Now do you want to buy the site? Maybe. Maybe not. You
certainly have to give some thought to terminating the
deal and just licensing the product directly from the
programmer.
The decision to buy a website is one that
should not be taken lightly. Due diligence is critical
to avoiding pitfalls and traps when doing so. Contact
me today at 619-637-6043 if you are considering buying
a website to avoid problems.
Richard A. Chapo, Esq.
