Wouldn’t it be something if we really could turn this day into a day of community service?

On September 11th, people made the ultimate sacrifice for our ignoring the warning signs and reports.  Our citizens and soldiers continue to put their lives on the line every day in ways and places where my grandmother would have asked, “You want to do what?  Where?  What kind of meshugeneh idea is that?”  I don’t know anyone personally who perished in the terrorist attacks of September 11th . . .  I only know people who did.  I have been supremely blessed.

There is a level of courage that human beings displayed when confronted with the unspeakable terror and horror of choosing the way they would die:  Jump from 80 stories or try to outrun thousands of tons of burning steel about to crush them.  They were tested in a way that I hope never to experience.  A day of working toward a better world, a smarter world, an aware world–away from the mind-numbing stupidity on television, in the political corridors, even in cyberspace–would be a profound way to honor those innocents who lost the gamble.

Some people may complain that they don’t need commmunity service–they’ll remember September 11th and its impact for as long as they live.  But what about those who aren’t born yet?  Or who were too young to remember?  As poet and philospher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

In addition to the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, there are a host of federal and state laws concerning false advertising, trade, trademarks, copyrights and contract terms that DO apply to your online business activities.

So how can you create an e-commerce website that doesn’t become a breeding ground for lawsuits? For starters, have a look at “Careless With Your Business Website?  Don’t Get Sued.” written by my colleague, technology lawyer Mark Grossman, Esq.  Also check out my article on Website Terms and Conditions at GreatBusinessLawTips.com.

According to research from Advocacy, tax compliance is 67 percent more burdensome for the smallest businesses compared to their larger competitors.  Tax complexity, combined with the fact that 53 percent of America’s small businesses are home-based, prompted Advocacy’s support for H.R. 7074.

The news release underscores the fact that:

SBA’s Women’s Business Center program, administered by its Office of Women’s Business Ownership, promotes the growth of women-owned businesses by providing business training and technical assistance, helping with access to credit and capital, and identifying federal contract and international trade opportunities. The program provided business counseling and training assistance to 148,106 individuals during fiscal year 2007.

Why care? Because of Labor Day’s history. Said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor:

“Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country. All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day . . . is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.”

Rather, it celebrates the social and economic achievements of American workers, and the contributions they have made to the strength, prosperity and well-being of our country.

Our Founding Fathers also felt a need to be released from tyranny . . . of a different sort. They wrote:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . . .

Just as a wedding is a declaration of the feelings and relationship that two people have developed for and with each other, The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of the political feelings the American Colonies had developed about the system of government they had to endure. They weren’t happy–not by a long shot–and took their lives in their hands when they declared themselves “Free and Independent States” and that “all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.” The rest–and the chain of events that unfolded thereafter–is history.

56 people signed the Declaration of Independence, including two future presidents.

• Identify information security concerns and the services that address those concerns;
• Make recommendations to the SBA regarding how it can better assist small businesses to both understand cyber-security issues and identify resources to help meet those complex challenges; and
• Promote current programs and services that will help small businesses protect their customers’ valuable information.

“Inspired” by recent high-profile data breaches, bill sponsor Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, R-Maine, a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said in a statement, “Nearly one-fifth of small businesses do not use virus-scanning for e-mail, [more than] 60 percent do not protect their wireless networks with encryption, and two-thirds do not have an information security plan.”

50 years ago, May 1 was designated by a joint resolution of Congress as the official date for celebrating Law Day. Originally established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower (by proclamation), Law Day is a national day set aside to celebrate the rule of law and how the legal process contributes to the freedoms that all Americans share.

Before you start to tear your hair out about the ways that laws have complicated your life, take a moment to think about the ways that law has made our society great. People from all over the world risk life and limb, and leave their families behind, to come here. Laws contribute to this being the “land of opportunity.”

Law Day is not just a day to make lawyers feel good about themselves–if you think about what the world was like in 1958, when Law Day was first established, we had emerged from the ashes of World War II, seen two wars in the Middle East, gone in and out of Korea and watched the French get defeated in Vietnam. The U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (”separate does not mean equal”) had been decided only a few years before and opened the door to significant social change in this country. Law was (and can still be) a way of righting a terrible imbalance of tyranny and unfairness.

We may debate whether laws are wise, necessary or fair, but few would dispense with them altogether. We use laws both to provide our freedoms and to protect our freedoms.

And now, I’m free to get off my soapbox and enjoy the rest of the day!

Sadly, all too many people and companies find that, upon doing so, they’ve been “phished.” “Phishing” (according to Webopedia) is a term that means “the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft.” The U.S. Senate has recognized the problem, and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) recently introduced legislation to provide the Federal Trade Commission with authority to enforce the prohibition against phishing (Of course, whether it authorizes the funding to pay for the enforcement is another matter). (See S. 2661 in the 110th Congress, 2nd session).

Highlights of the Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008 include:

• Prohibiting deceptive domain names (this means using a name like “Citidank” and posing as a banking institution);
• Prohibiting domain name registrars from interfering with efforts to discover the identity of “phishers” who have obtained deceptive domain names;
• Allowing all state attorneys general, aggrieved trademark holders and affected internet service providers to bring lawsuits against the culprits (note, though, individual lawsuits are not expressly permitted, and it would probably be too costly for an individual to investigate and bring a lawsuit against a “phisher”); and
• Restricting damages from exceeding $2 million (except in special circumstances).

The moral of the story: Don’t click on everything you see. Confirm all requests for private information by telephone–and do not use the number you see in that e-mail (it, too, could be a scam). Ask that the request be sent to you by “snail” mail.