Do any of these sound like you?
- You wonder about the legal issues that are relevant to your WordPress site.
- You wonder about what sorts of images and videos you can use.
- You’re not sure what music you can use for your WordPress or other podcast.
- You wonder whether you should have terms of use, privacy policies or cookie policies for your WordPress site.
- You hunger for knowledge (or at least want to know…) about the GPL and what it means for your WordPress business.
- You want to know how to use Gravity Forms to build a contract generator.
- You’re looking for some contractual documentation for your WordPress project.
- You want to know more about the WordPress trademarks.
- You wonder if certain plugins can be used for both good (legal) and evil (not so legal) purposes and where the dividing line is.
- You have any other questions about your use of WordPress and legal stuff, whether it relates to WordPress itself or the purposes for which you’re using it.
If so, you’re at the right place. I’d like to answer these sorts of questions.
Who’s behind WP and Legal Stuff?
Yep, that’s me
That’d be me, Richard Best, a dual qualified lawyer (New Zealand and England & Wales) who began his practice of law in 1996 and has worked in New Zealand, England and Germany, in large law firms, as in-house counsel and now as a sole practitioner. I’m also a member of Best + Hancock | Sole Practitioners (a consortium of sole practitioners) and Interwoven Law (an alliance of niche practices). Since late 2006 my primary focus has been on IP/IT/technology law and public law.
I consider myself fortunate to have worked in the countries I have as I’ve been exposed to common law legal systems and civil law legal systems. The common law tradition underpins the laws of countries like England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and Singapore, among many others. The civil law (or Roman law) tradition underpins the legal systems of almost all European member states (except for the United Kingdom and Ireland) and many continental Latin American countries, among many others.
Extra, extra…
If you’ve read enough already and would like to sign up to my mailing list, you can sign up right now. In addition to letting you know about new posts, I’ll be sharing additional information, tips and other things not available on the site itself, including a “Did you know?” series.
Back to the elevator ride
I’ve been using and digging into WordPress since around 2005 and think it and the community around it are great. I’d like to explore the intersection between law and WordPress and to share my experiences and knowledge with the WordPress community.
As I said in My WordPress story, it’s this personal history that I have with WordPress and my passion for it that gave me the idea for writing this blog. I’d like to bring disparate legal threads together and help WordPress developers, designers and users navigate the legal issues that can arise through their varied uses of WordPress itself, WordPress themes and plugins and a range of other things. Some of these issues are unique to WordPress or specific theme shops, plugins or services while others can arise with any GPL-licensed software or any self-publishing. My goal is to cover as many WordPress-relevant legal topics as I can, in a single place, to give WordPress developers, designers and users as much of a one-stop-legal-shop as I can. I hope it helps.
Questions, questions
If you’d like me to consider any particular issue, don’t be afraid to ask me a question. I’ll do what I can to answer it or point you in the right direction. (You’ll appreciate, though, that I’m not providing legal advice on this blog.)