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Ep. 10 - How to Legally Protect Your Online Course (Membership)
Episode 1013th April 2023 • Not So Risky Business • Mariam Tsaturyan
00:00:00 00:44:13

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In this episode, you will find out how to safeguard your online course or membership business with confidence. I share some legal implications you need to know to ensure your online course stays protected in this day and age.

We talk about:

  • The importance of keeping your Terms & Agreements updated
  • Why a Collaboration Agreement is necessary when teaming up with a co-creator
  • All about Copyright Registration to keep your content safe
  • Why you should consider trademarking your brand
  • Ensuring your payments & refunds are well within the scope of law

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Legal Disclaimer: Although Mariam Tsaturyan is a licensed attorney, she is not your attorney. Any information, tips, or materials in these podcast episodes are for educational and informational purposes only. No attorney-client privilege or relationship is established by your subscribing, downloading, or listening to any of Not So Risky Business podcast episodes. The information shared in the Not So Risky Business podcast episodes is not intended to be legal advice and should not be construed as such or as a substitute for getting legal advice from your attorney. If you need specific legal advice, consult with your attorney.


Transcripts

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Welcome back to episode 10 of Not So Risky Business podcast. I'm incredibly excited about today because let's face it, it's episode 10. It's a milestone on its own. This is incredibly a happy time for me because honestly, I've been deciding to do my podcast.. to start a podcast for years and every time I would decide to start it, something would come up or it wouldn't be perfect then I would say, okay, maybe not yet. Today is not the right time yet.

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And I finally did so now the fact that I already have 10 episodes of my podcast live and published, makes me feel a little bit accomplished when it comes to my content creation. I'm not the best person when it comes to content creation because I end up doing a lot of things, keeping myself busy.

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And creating content always goes on a back burner even though it's an incredibly important part of running a business. That's why this makes me feel really great because I promised myself that 2023 was going to be different and I feel like I'm finally making that happen. At least with this, my next step would be to actively start publishing on YouTube as well. So once that happens then,

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I will feel like I've just won a jackpot or something. But anyways, today's topic is one that I'm going to cover because I have received probably at least 30 emails from people asking me about this specifically. They were worded differently but the gist is the same; How to legally protect your online course and or membership.

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Now, online courses and memberships can mean the same thing. In fact, some people will argue that they're exactly the same thing. Some diehards, when it comes to memberships and online courses, will argue that there are certain differences. And I agree there are certain differences. When I say membership, I understand there's going to be more of a live component to it.

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Also it's obviously, it's not something that you buy and you're done. It's continuous that you need to continuously pay for and get access to new materials as you go. But generally speaking, the types of materials that you have in an online course and in memberships are fairly similar.

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In an online course, you are going to have obviously some kind of text, you're going to have audio, most likely video. Maybe you'll have some workbooks and PDFs to download. Memberships are almost guaranteed to come with all of that as well. Maybe they'll also have some kind of a live call component to them.

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Maybe like a monthly zoom calls or weekly zoom calls. Although, courses could have that as well. So this is why I'm saying that people will argue that they're similar. Now for today's purposes, we're going to cover how to legally protect your online courses. When I say courses, also understand memberships.

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If there is a specific thing, legally speaking, that is separate or different for courses versus memberships, I'll let you know. If not, then take what I say today and you can apply to both your online course business and your membership business. Why are online courses so important? Number one, because they create a really nice and convenient way of earning money online.

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And generally speaking, it's a relatively passive way of making money online. Yes, creating a course initially is not easy. It can take time. It can take resources and energy, you know, to do everything you're supposed to do and to do it well but once you create that online course with the exception of just keeping it updated or adding more information to it as it becomes necessary,

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It becomes a fairly passive way to make money because you create it once and you sell it many times over. One of my most successful online courses to this day has been my ADA Compliance Now online course for which I have I think 356-357 students. That was something that I have created once and now I'm selling it to multiple people over and over again.

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Yes, I do go in from time to time and make updates to it as it becomes necessary as the law change, as the requirements change, or as new tools become available to us but mainly, it's there for me to make money and the same is true for you. Whether you have an online course or a membership. Now with memberships, you might have a little bit more work than with courses, but again, the idea is the same.

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Because of their unique nature, right? Online courses are very unique in that they are digital products. They live online, it's not something tangible that you can touch. It is your intellectual property but because of this unique nature, they also face a few unique issues when it comes to legal requirements and protections that you need to be aware about.

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After today's episode, I want you to be able to know with confidence how to protect your online course or membership business. So what are some legal implications we need to know, worry about or make sure that we are covered when it comes to online courses? We will cover things like your content, we will cover things like your intellectual property such as your copyrights and your trademarks.

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Most importantly, we will talk about your contracts and policies. We will talk about your scope of practice. I shouldn't say practice cause it implies legal, but the scope of your knowledge, let's put it that way. What are you allowed to talk about? What are you not allowed to talk about? In other words, to put it in layman's terms, how to stay in your lane, right?

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So you are not but trespassing on other areas where you're not an expert, you don't know enough and what you say can actually hurt others. We will cover issues related to payments, late payments, missed payments. We will more importantly cover subscription payments, especially as they apply to California consumers.

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We will talk about things like NDAs, collaboration, agreements, guest lectures, we'll cover refunds and a lot of other grounds. So with that said, let's begin today's episode and if you find this episode useful and helpful, I would appreciate it if you took a quick minute to leave a review for my podcast on Apple podcasts and I'll leave the link in the show notes to make it easy for you.

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So let's begin. The first thing I want to cover when it comes to online courses is your terms of use or terms and agreements. An online course is something that you're going to create online. It will be comprised of videos, most likely audios, some texts and you might even have some downloadables in there, like PDFs.

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Some links maybe to Google docs, to Google sheets, or maybe you house something in your Dropbox or a link to your Dropbox or Google drive, whatever it is but your online course lives online. How do you make sure that people use your online course the way you intend them to use it?

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That they are not doing something that you don't want them to do. The main way of making sure that happens is by having a very strong Terms of use or terms and conditions agreement in place. It's a policy. Now, this is not a legally required policy but to me as an attorney, your terms of use or terms and conditions is the most important policy you can have for protecting your business legally. So do not ignore this just because it is not legally required in the same way that a privacy policy is does not make it any less important.

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To me, this is the single most important policy to have. Now your terms of use agreement is where you're going to talk about your rules, your processes, your conditions. What are your buyers allowed to do with your course? How are they allowed to use it? How and when will they get access to it for how long?

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More specifically, what are they not allowed to do when they get access to your course? There's a lot of issues that you need to consider for online courses. For example, from simple things like sharing accounts, sharing passwords, to duplicating your content, to downright copying your entire content and infringing your course and selling it as their own, to maybe downloading some of the workbooks and downloadables that you have in there and recreating those for their own online courses or passing it off as their own.

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So when it comes to accessing your course, you need to consider all of that. So make sure your terms of use or terms and agreement policy very clearly states all the grounds. First, cover what your buyers or purchasers are allowed to do and then cover what they're not allowed to do or what is forbidden under the terms.

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Now this next part is extremely important and this is something that many people out there get wrong because some people might have this terms of use policy in place. They might require the buyers to agree to the terms before purchase but here is what they don't do: They do not periodically update their terms of use or terms and conditions policy.

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Why is updating important? Why is it even an issue? Why can't you just get your terms of use created for your business and leave it at that? Updating is extremely important because technology changes. Laws change. You need to be updating your policy to reflect what's going on today.

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What's possible to do today with the technology in place? For example, let's talk in hypotheticals now. Something like screen recorders, right? Something like Loom or ScreenFlow or any other screen recording extensions or softwares were not even a possibility, maybe like 15-20 years ago. I don't know. I should really look into this but I'm fairly sure. 20 years ago, they weren't even something that people considered.

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Therefore, your terms of use agreement or your terms and conditions agreement did not really need to address whether people were allowed to record your screen. But now that technology exists, people use it heavily. In fact, there's an entire website that consists of black market online courses where people illegally download recorded screens of those courses.

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And started selling those recordings online for pennies, basically for a super low amount compared to the actual original course itself. Obviously, if you have a course, your terms of use agreement should cover this ground. You should make it known that they are not allowed to screen record your content and post it online.

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So this is why updating your policy or keeping it fresh is important because new technologies, softwares, laws, possibilities come into play that you didn't think about before, but now they are real concerns. So you need to update it. Another thing is you cannot possibly predict every single scenario that you'll come across as a business owner.

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You might have a customer who has a particularly unique situation and they get in touch with you. You might be annoyed with them, they might be annoyed with you, whatever the case. But if that was something that was important for you, let's say it created problems for you that you didn't predict before. Now, there you go.

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This is something that you can go and update your policy to make sure that in the future, these kind of things does not happen. Keep your policy updated, incredibly important. The second thing, when it comes to your policy, you want it to be very clearly written and you want it to be available to your buyers.

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So having that policy in place and having it be just the small font or link in the footer of your website or sales page or whatnot. Serves you in no way. You want your buyers to actually have access to it. You want them to read it, encourage them to read it.

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You want them to understand that they're agreeing to all those terms when they're buying from you. Now one simple and common way to do that is to have a link on the checkout page where it'll say something like I agree to the terms and conditions or terms of use of this course and there'll be like a check mark that they need to check.

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And there is a link that you want people to visit once they check mark that because people can’t say they agree to something without actually reading it. And then it's hard, they’ll be like, oh, but I didn't actually read it. Who actually reads it nowadays. It was just a check mark that I had to check in order to purchase this course.

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So have that in mind, take that into consideration and make the process of them accessing that policy, that agreement as easy and barrier free as possible. So I would definitely have it in the checkout section. I would definitely have it on the actual landing page itself. Moreover, I would go step further.

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I would include the terms and conditions, and this is completely optional. And a lot of people don't do this because obviously aesthetically, it might not be something that makes sense but if you want it to be like extra protected, I would even include your terms and conditions, full policy or terms of use policy.

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As a first lesson or lesson zero or maybe you have a lesson that says welcome. Maybe it's a video of you and then maybe at the end of that video, I would say go to the next page where I am laying down all the terms and conditions or terms of use for this online course, make sure to read and understand it

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because it's there for you. You have agreed to the terms, and so on and so forth. Be creative with it. So you can have an actual lesson inside your online course or membership area. Where you have copy pasted your actual terms of use policy. Another way to do that is to deliver it by email.

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When you're delivering access to the course, also have a link to your terms of use agreement in there. Maybe have it in your PS section, have it in your signature, have it as like the very first link in your email, whatever and however you want to do it. The goal is to make sure that your potential buyers get access to that.

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So that's the agreement that you need to worry about. I would say this is one of the most important ways of protecting your online business, your online course and online memberships. Now next section, since we're talking about agreements and policies, I want to touch up on other agreements that you might need to take care of in order to protect your online courses legally.

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Let's say hypothetically, you have an online course where you have a guest lecture. Maybe you’re talking about lead generation or Facebook marketing in general. Maybe let's say you're an expert at doing Facebook lives and that's what you're teaching but you also want your buyers to have this bonus content access to Facebook ads.

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So in order to teach them Facebook ads, maybe you have invited an expert on that topic and that person teaches that one particular lesson, Facebook ads, within your online course or membership. Now this can potentially present some problems if you do not take care of this from the very beginning.

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That person that is teaching in your online course, you need to have a collaboration agreement with, I would even go as far as have an NDA, non-disclosure agreement with this person in place. Collaboration agreement will state the terms of you two working together, whether this person is getting paid, how, whether they're getting credit or actual payment.

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What do they have access to? How do they have access to that thing? What are they allowed to do with the contents that they recorded? Two, are they the ones who own it? Are you the one who owns it? Do they give you license to use it in your course? Is it exclusive or non-exclusive license and all of these issues that are incredibly important.

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You need to address in your collaboration agreement and the other one is NDA. If that person who's going to be a guest lecturer for you or a teacher in your online course, if they become privy to secret information or proprietary information when it comes to your business, you might want to have them sign a nondisclosure agreement so that they do not go and tell other people about your proprietary or secret information and ruin your business.

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So other things to keep in mind are those. Now I'm a big one when it comes to online businesses, obviously. And this is, I would say the number one thing that people, course creators think about when they think legal protection, this is what comes to mind and it is how to protect the content of their online courses. In other words, how do they make sure that someone does not get access to their online course or does not purchase their online course

[:

and turn around and copy that material and sell it as their own or share it with others. This is where copyright registration comes into play. Your content for your online course, whether they are videos, audios, downloadable PDFs in there or texts, those are all protectable under copyright law. So you can register your copyright for your online course before you publish it. You can register it as a group work if, however, it is published and publication is a term, it's a legal term in this case, it doesn't necessarily always mean the same thing as you click submit and it's published.

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If it's an unpublished work, in most cases, you can register it as a group work. If it's a published work, then you would have to protect each individual piece of the content on its own but it's totally worth it because once you have your copyright registration in place, if somebody was to infringe on your copyright, then you could actually take them to court, ask the judge to issue a court order, stopping that person from using it.

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Now can you actually protect your online course if you don't register your copyright? Yes to some degree, copyright protection is automatic so that those rights attached to you from the moment your work is created. However, without registration, those protections that you get are limited. For discussion on how these rights are,

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How your rights with a registered copyright are and how they're not, you can go back to our previous episodes and you can listen to when I've talked about trademarks and copyrights, I'll link it in the show notes for you so you can figure out how those protections are the same, how they're different, why you need registration in certain cases. And when you can get away without one.

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So copyright, extremely important for online courses, especially if the course that you're talking about or you're considering protecting is something that you intend to keep selling over and over again. In other words, I know plenty of people who create online courses, they sell it once or twice, and then they retire it. If that's the case, then, maybe you decide for yourself if legal protection is necessary.

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However, if this is the type of course that is part of your brand, that's part of what you're teaching and you want to be able to offer this over and over again, I would highly consider protecting it with copyright registration. Now the other part is trademark. Trademark is not going to protect the content of your online course or membership.

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What trademark will protect is the name, is the logo, is the slogan. Color or any other brand source identifier for that course or business. Now the very first step when people tell me, what is it that I should register a trademark for? If you've never done trademark for anything in your life before then the very first step is to make sure that your overall brand is protected.

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If let's say you have already protected your brand, then I would say go ahead and register your trademark for your online course and or membership title if it's something that you want to become part of your brand. Let's say you have created a signature product that you want to be known by, then by all means register your trademark for that because that's the only way you will own that brand and you will be able to prevent others from creating something similar sounding and selling it out there under that same name.

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So trademarks protect your brand and brand source identifiers while copyright will protect your actual content for the online courses and or memberships, both are incredibly important but they are different things. It's a judgment call which one you want to do first. I would say, concentrate on protecting your brand, number one.

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Your online course content with copyright registration, number two. And then your online course title with another trademark registration, so that's number three. Now, the other issue with online courses to consider is the fact that it's online and it can be shared. It can be shared with other people. So let's say Sally purchased an online course from you.

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And Sally decided she wants to help out her best friend who also needs your online course information but maybe this friend doesn't have money to buy it, or so Sally thinks, so she's being a good friend and she shares her online course log-in and password information with her friend, let's call her Anna.

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Now Anna has access to your course but Anna did not purchase your course, therefore, as a business owner, you're losing money because your course is being shared out there without your consent, without your knowledge, people are benefiting from the content you have created and they're not paying you.

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It's number one, unethical to do this. It's illegal to do this and it's just really bad form, like honestly, to do it. But a lot of the times you can't really, you aren't really aware of this. So what are some things that you can do to fight it? Number one, We need to adopt, we need to get out of this little box we put ourselves in when it comes to legal protections and think of it in common sense way as well.

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We need to make it difficult for others to steal, copy, share our content. Because if, for example, if your neighborhood is known as a high crime area, you are not going to just say whether my door is locked or open, if somebody wants to rob me, they'll rob me.

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You're going to make sure that you lock your door, that you secure everything. Let's say before leaving for a three, four day vacation so that nobody can get in. You're not going to leave your door wide open and say, if they don't want to Rob me, they won't rob me regardless of what I do and vice versa. So you're going to take some precautions. The same is true for your online courses and or memberships. Now there are some plugins and software out there

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That make copying information from your website difficult. I won't say impossible because nothing is ever truly impossible because even though somebody couldn't just copy paste it, they could still open up your content and type it out manually if need be. They can read it out and then transcribe that reading. So nothing is impossible.

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But there are ways to make it a little bit difficult. As I said, there are certain plugins and extensions that you can have on your website, within your course to make this copying and sharing a little bit extra difficult for people to do. Things that can prevent people from using the right click and copy pasting content.

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Things that will prevent people from using right click and looking at the code source of your website and so on so do put those in place. Now, another thing that exists and I'll be honest with you, I don't know the name of this, but for example, my contracts which I housed them contract templates that I house them on Shopify.

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I use this Shopify app called Sky Pilot to deliver these digital products to my buyers and this app,Sky Pilot, has a built-in system where if somebody accesses my policies from different IP locations, it lets me know. It says like this account has accessed this information from more than one IP in, within the last three days or within the last hour, whatever it is.

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So that lets you know that, okay maybe your content is being shared illegally without your permission, without your consent, maybe that means somebody shared their username and password to your online course that's why there is different IP locations. So somebody might access it from California and then like within the same hour, it shows that person's account access it from New York and so on. So you know that something’s at play here.

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Now, I don't know if course platforms have something like that built in but I'm fairly positive, even if they don't have it built-in, there are some apps and extensions and softwares that you can add on to your tool stack to make that a possibility for you. Nowadays, technology’s so advanced that there's almost nothing that is impossible. You can do whatever you put your mind to.

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It's both blessing and a curse because the same is true for your infringers. They can find ways around everything but that's the other thing to consider. And again, you want to make sure your terms of use policy talks about account sharing and repercussions. What happens? How will you take action? What are you going to do? Are you going to demand payment and so on and so forth. So address all of those things in your terms of use as well.

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Next thing or next point that I want to address when it comes to online courses and memberships are your payments. So when it comes to payments, there's a few things we need to take into account. Are you going to accept different payment platforms? For example, PayPal, Stripe, or authorized net.

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Are you going to accept payment plans? What happens if a payment is missed? Let's say somebody was on a payment plan and their next payment, they didn't make it. What happens if a payment is late? What happens if there's a credit card on file and it expires? And what happens when you have some sort of a subscription payment model in place where it has to renew automatically?

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So all of these things are things that you need to take into consideration when it comes to legally protecting your online courses and or memberships. For payment purposes, majority of the work will come down to your software. We call this dunning emails and a lot of software have this built in. I use ThriveCart. I know that ThriveCart has a built-in dunning system. Samcart has a dunning system as well like they have their own notifications on stuff where a payment is coming up, it will send them notification or if a payment is missed, it will send the notification and so on.

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With this payment notifications, payment emails, for example, if there was supposed to be a payment due on, let's say hypothetically speaking, it's a week past that deadline, what happens? My personal system is set up in a way where before the payment is due three days before it's actually due, I'll send that out.

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One email three days before, another one two days before, another one one day before. And then once the payment is late, it'll do the same thing. But for late payments, I'll send out one day late, two day late, three day late and these emails, as it sends out these emails, it also retries the payment method. It retries to get payment. If, let's say, you have a credit card stored in your system, it retries to charge it. Sometimes it's successful. Sometimes it fails. Maybe the card is expired.

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Maybe it's an incorrect card number. Something went wrong. It doesn't have to be, have done intentionally, but sometimes mistakes get made and it's difficult for the system to charge the next installment payment that is owed to you. So whatever the case, when it comes to the legal aspects and payments being missed or late, you have to consider how are you going to handle the situation with access to your course and or membership.

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Let's say payment is late. Are you going to disable that person's access to your online course? If so, how many days are you going to wait? In other words, how much grace period are you going to give them before you disable their access? Are you notifying them that you're disabling their access? How do they get it back?

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When they do pay you, do they pay you the only amount they owed to you? Or is there some kind of a penalty charge on top of that? If you are going to do like a penalty charge, make sure it actually is legal in your own jurisdiction in your state. In most places, it's not. Some places allow it so make sure that you look into your local rules and regulations for that, this and all the other questions that I've brought up, those are things that you need to consider. How are you going to handle your content access or online course access for those people?

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Now, we're going to go back to your terms of use policy again just because this also is a situation that you need to address in your terms of use policy and address it very clearly so that your purchaser, your consumer knows exactly what's going to happen if they don't make a payment or if they're late with the payment.

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They know what to expect. They know they're going to lose access or not lose access, whatever you decide, as long as it's stated clearly, as long as your buyer understands what is going to happen to them, you are good, okay? That's the whole point of this. Now, there was another point that I wanted to bring up for you specifically with payments and this one has to do with subscription payments.

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More specifically, automatically renewing payments. So California last year in 2022, they had this whole update to their automatic renewal payments or automatic renewal laws, they call this ARL where if, let's say, you have a payment that is a subscription payment, let's say somebody

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every month or every year, whatever the period doesn't matter, that thing gets updated automatically. And that person gets charged automatically upon renewal. So under the ARL laws, you need to give clear conspicuous warning to the consumer. They need to know, number one, if there is a free trial, what's the exact length of the free trial?

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What's the exact date they're going to be charged? How much are they going to get charged? Is this a recurring payment or is it a one-time pay? When are the payments due exactly? How to cancel? And on top of that, you must provide a clear and extremely simple way for them to cancel this recurring payments or subscriptions on their own, so either a button or a link.

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That with one click cancels it or some sort of a pre formatted email that they can just click send and it gets sent to you and they don't have to do anything else on their part. So this ARL or the subscription rules are very specific to California buyers only. But, with laws, you never know. Today it's California, tomorrow might be Virginia or Colorado or another state.

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So just keep this in mind. If you do have California-based buyers and if you do have some sort of a subscription model, make sure that your model is ready for California buyers as well. Now, we can't possibly talk about money and payments and not talk about refunds when it comes to your online courses. Unfortunately, refunds and returns,

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whatever, are part of doing business and they are part of doing business, whether you're a traditional brick and mortar business owner, or whether you're an online business owner and you create and sell online courses. Some people, I'll be the first to admit this, I know some people who heavily abused the power of refunds. They make this almost into a habit. They'll go buy a course, they'll get access to the content, they'll rip the benefits of it and then they'll request a refund and if you don't give them a refund, they'll go around bad mouthing you.

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Or leaving horrible reviews and ruining your reputation as a business owner. This used to be a pretty, I would say, widespread way of getting course creators to accommodate them. Because no business owner wants to have a bad reputation online because obviously, they're fearing that it will prevent other people from buying from them.

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However, as a business owner, you are not obligated to let others walk all over you and scare you into doing something that you're not legally obligated to do. Especially when you make this very clear and conspicuous to your buyers and potential buyers. So when it comes to refunds, one, you need to determine whether you're offering them or not.

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Two, if you are offering them and I suggest offering them just because honestly, number one, you are more likely to have good buyers because if somebody wants to purchase, but they don't see, I'm one of those people, for example, if I want to purchase something, especially if it's something little bit high priced,

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And I don't see a refund option for it. It doesn't mean that I'm going to go and request a refund but I like to know that it's there because for whatever reason, that course, that program might be the wrong fit for you. So you want the refund option to be there. It just increases credibility and trust in you but regardless, there's no law for this. If you're never offering refunds, that's totally fine.

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As long as you state it incredibly clearly, conspicuously in bold, big letters for your buyers to know. The refund will go in your terms of use and in a separate refund policy section. It might also be mentioned in your emails. It might be mentioned in your sales pages. So make sure it's clearly stated in as many places as you can.

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If you're not offering one, make it clear you're not offering one. If you are offering one, chances are there are some conditions on it. Maybe it's a time condition. Maybe they can get a refund within the first seven days, 14 days, 30, 60 days, whatever the time period you decide, make sure to enforce it and again,

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Make it very clear that's the time period that they can request a refund. If they are outside of that time period, make it clear what happens if they are outside of that time period. Are you still going to consider those refund requests? Are they automatically going to be denied because they're outside of the time period? Or maybe are you going to determine them case by case basis? I highly recommend having a systematized approach to this.

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Just decide on one way of doing things, write it down for yourself and treat all the cases the same to avoid headaches and more headaches and creating more busy work for you because this way, you will have to go in and personally analyze every single refund request if it's outside of the time period, to determine if you want to give a refund to this person or not, and then you have to determine, okay, what are some basis that you'll consider granting the refund to them if they are outside of the time period? Do you see where I'm going with this?

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It creates extra unnecessary work. Systematize as much as possible. Have one approach to things so that your business can have this predictable, repeatable, simple steps that you can do over and over again. And you can train other people to do over and over again. So that's that with the refunds, it can be time period based. It might be conditional-based. You might say,

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Do the work, fill out all the worksheets and do all the workbooks and then send us proof that you've done the work and it didn't work for you. So this is a little bit, I'm not a big fan of this method and this is a way that a lot of big names do the refund requests. It's almost as if it's the refund request is there.

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But it creates so much busy work for the buyer. Like they have to go do everything step-by-step, to send your proof that they've done it almost like school and homework. For me personally, it's a little bit of a turnoff. I wouldn't go that way. I wouldn't do that as far as approaches go, but there is no right or wrong when it comes to this. As long as

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You clearly state what your policies are when it comes to refunds. How many days after can they request one? How do they go about requesting one and so on? So just clearly write it out so your buyers know what to expect so you can avoid future problems that just, I didn't know that you didn't have a refund in place or

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I didn't know how to request one, or I didn't know that your refund only was good for only 14 days. Eliminate those objections from the very beginning. So that down the line, you're not dealing with the headache that comes with refund requests. So this is it for today when it comes to legally protecting your online courses and or memberships.

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I am hopeful that you will find this information very useful. I have had multiple people tell me that because they didn't know how to do things legally, they have abstained from creating online courses or they have abstained from creating some kind of a digital product and selling it, just because they weren't sure about the legal steps and requirements they needed to comply with.

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Don't do that. Okay. Build your business. Earn your money. Scale your business and leave the legal to me. If you have a question when it comes to your online business, your online courses and memberships and whatnot, send me a quick email. Ask me a question. If the response is a quick one or two-liner, I'll answer to you in an email.

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If it's a little bit more complicated, where I’ll need to give proper explanation for you to understand the basis, I’ll create an entire podcast episode around it. So feel free to get in touch with me. If you liked today's episode, go ahead and leave me a review on Apple podcasts and I'll be super grateful for that.

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Thanks so much for spending your time with me today. Oh one other thing before I let you go, as I said, today was episode 10 of my podcast. After today, my episode is going to be published once a week, instead of twice a week. I want to cut back on how often I publish just to give me enough time to properly promote each episode.

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And market it as each episode deserves to be. Right now, I'm cutting it a little bit close and I'm not leaving enough time for marketing and proper promotion. So from this point on, my podcast episodes will be published every Tuesday. Once a week, you'll have a new episode up once again. Thanks for spending your time with me today. Love you all take care talk to you soon.

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