This person will be responsible for closing your email addresses, social media profiles, and blogs after you are deceased. Sounds good, but legally it’s tricky territory.
SEAPA says the key trend is that governments are shifting focus from traditional broadcast and print media to social media and online news. SEAPA Executive Director Gayathry Venkiteswaran said online news sites have become the most frequent target.
CT: The growing usage of the internet and social media in Liberia is certainly a progressive trend. Having worked in Liberia, can you briefly tell us how the internet and social media are viewed by the cross sections of the Liberia population?
By MyCorporation CALABASAS, Calif., May 3, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — Calabasas-based company MyCorporation is releasing a new social media product to benefit small businesses, MyCorpSocial.
Hordes of angry hockey fans – presumably Boston Bruins fans — unleashed a barrage of racist rants on Twitter and other social-networking sites after the Washington Capitals beat the defending champion Bruins a week ago Wednesday on an overtime goal.
Some of the issues covered in depth in the paper include: Build up a positive online social media profile. “It is absolutely crucial to remember that anything you post online may stay there forever, in one form or another, so think carefully.
Canadian consumers are being encouraged to consider their online property, including social media accounts, when planning a will. A new report released earlier this week by the BMO Retirement Institute raises concerns.
SNOPA
Continued concern about employers asking applicants and employees for their passwords to social media sites has led to the introduction of a federal bill.
The legal and regulatory environment impacting social media is constantly evolving. Here is a collection of recent articles impacting everything from law enforcement use of social media to new legislation.
A social media tip line for police
Boston.com
“Use of social media has provided an additional outlet for people to interact with law enforcement” says Lauri Stevens – founder of LAwS Communications, a consulting company that helps law enforcement agencies expand into social media.
Social media limits and the law
Monterey County Herald
Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat, introduced a bill that would prohibit employers, public or private, from requiring or requesting in writing a prospective employee to disclose user names or passwords for personal social media accounts.
Ariz. bill says unlawful to ‘annoy’ others online
BusinessWeek
“Speaking to annoy or offend is not a crime,” Media Coalition Executive Director David Horowitz said. Horowitz said if the proposal becomes law, speech done in satire, political debate or even sports trash talking could get people in unnecessary legal trouble.
Social Media in China, Innovation
Washington Post
Apr. 2, 2012 – April 2 (Bloomberg) — Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at Stanford Law School and head of academics at Singularity University, talks about social media in China and innovation.
UAE legal experts want libel to apply to social networking sites
GMA News
Claiming that Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites can be used to spread rumors and false information, the legal community in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is seeking that libel laws be applied to offenders on the Internet.
Is Your Facebook Password Like Your Mail, House Key, or Drug Test?
The Atlantic
A day after it was proposed, the amendment was voted down — almost entirely along party lines — thus closing one door to social media privacy legislation, at least on the national level. (There are similar social media privacy laws — full bills, …
Sponsor: Arizona bill isn’t aimed at Internet trolls
CNN
The fear is that the bill would prohibit hateful comments on news and social-media sites, amounting to a ban on so-called Internet trolling. The problem: The bill won’t do any of that, its sponsor told CNN on Wednesday. “I think they’re absolutely …
How Family Law Attorneys Use Social Media Evidence [Infographic]
PR Web (press release)
Family Law Attorneys Dishon & Block formally released today an infographic that illustrates how attorneys use social media to collect “smoking gun” evidence for divorce and child custody cases. With the advancement in technology and modernizing of laws …
See all stories on this topic »
PR Web (press release)
Topics to be addressed include best practices for direct, digital and mobile marketing including advising on permission-based marketing, emerging technologies, the use of various social media platforms, as well as data security and privacy issues related to electronic and mobile commerce.
New FTC guidelines in the areas of advertising any marketing, as well as consumer privacy and security, have raised awareness of these issues for brands, marketing firms and service providers.
David M. Adler, Esq. is an attorney, author, educator, entrepreneur and nationally-recognized speaker in the fields of intellectual property, media & entertainment and technology law with a multidisciplinary practice focused on counseling businesses across the interrelated areas of Intellectual Property Law, Media & Entertainment, Information Technology and Corporate Law. David provides legal counsel on trademark and copyright clearance, registration and enforcement, digital and new media licensing, production, finance, regulations, Social Media, litigation and corporate-commercial transactions.
David has an extensive private-practice and in-house background counseling clients on marketing, advertising and content deals, lead-generation agreements, referral agreements, advertising-supported revenue deals, product placement, affiliate marketing/group-couponing platforms, CAN-SPAM compliance, digital rights management for video, music, and games. We work with many of the leading studios, labels, social networking sites, and online music companies. He also specializes in advising artistic talent and creative professionals in the arts, entertainment, media and sports industries.
In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission slapped Google and Facebook for violating their own privacy policies, forcing both to submit to years of privacy audits. In February, 2012 , the Obama administration issued a blueprint for a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.” The FTC, the main government agency responsible for protecting privacy, called Monday for legislation that would give consumers access to information collected about them by data brokers similar to the rights they now have to review information amassed by credit reporting agencies.
The FTC’s report comes a little over a month after the White House released its privacy bill of rights that called on companies to be more transparent about privacy and grant consumers greater access to their data but that stopped short of backing an explicit “do not track” rule. The Federal Trade Commission’s 57-page privacy report consisted of a set of “best practices” that the Internet industry is expected to follow — or face sanctions. The report mirrors many of the provisions of the “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” released by the White House and represents the first serious efforts at striking a balance in online consumer privacy protection related to web usage.
Critics contend the framework is not as extensive as the White House Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights announced back in February. That already made provision for “Do Not Track” technology, with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL – together responsible for almost 90-percent of behavioral advertising – already opting in. Privacy advocates have slammed the new” guidelines, arguing that the proposed system for ensuring online data security fails to take advantage of existing authority and relies too much on self-regulation of the online industry. The new framework “mistakenly endorses self-regulation and ‘notice and choice,’” the Electronic Privacy Information Center claims, ”and fails to explain why it has not used its current Section 5 authority to better safeguard the interests of consumers.”
US consumers are waking up to privacy issues related to smartphone use. About two-thirds of search engine users disapprove of the collection of information on their searches for the purpose of personalizing their future search results and an equal proportion of all internet users disapprove of being tracked for the purpose of getting targeted ads.
Interestingly, the two most popular smartphone platforms treat application data gathering differently. While Apple reviews prospective applications before launching them into its iPhone app store, Google’s open-source Android platform has no such system in place. But while the Android system runs each application separately and explicitly lists the services or data each application accesses, Apple’siPhone system treats all applications as equal and allows them to access many resources by default.
Until application developers and hardware makers start taking Privacy-By Design” seriously, users must pro-actively protect their privacy. If you have a smartphone and use it to download apps, there’s little you can do to completely lock down your personal information. But there are a number of precautions you can take to ensure minimal risk exposure.
So, here are seven basic basic smartphone privacy tips you can take to cut down on risks:
Don’t download apps form unknown sources. If you have not heard of an app, read its user reviews. Even better, look it up online and see what has been said about it.
When possible, opt out of information sharing capabilities.
Get acquainted with your phone’s GPS features. Most smartphones allow one to adjust which applications have access to GPS. Turn this feature off for all but the most essential of apps.
On Android: Before you download an app, check its user permissions. This should give you a breakdown of what information the app will access. Ask yourself if a simple game apps really needs to access the contact list?
For Android: If you’ve opted to “root” (obtain privileged access) your device, be wary of granting apps root access. Doing so grants them complete control over your phone.
For iPhone: If you have “jailbroken” (circumvented the proprietary programming restrixtions) your phone, be sure to change its root password. You can find guides online, or else get a trusted technician to do so for you.
If you are no longer using an app, uninstall it.
While there is no easy way to figure out which apps are the riskiest, paid apps tend to pass less data on than free ones. Remember, “free” content is usually monetized in other ways, most often by selling user data.
Intellectual property is often the most significant driver of value among a company’s assets. Therefore, it is increasingly important for companies to actively manage their intellectual property assets to identify, categorize, register and enforce IP assets while minimizing the possibility of legal disputes.
Whether acquiring technology, developing new products or taking stock of the company’s intangible assets, companies must develop ways to protect their assets better, determine ways to realize more revenue from such assets, and reduce risks of costly litigation.
Below are ten intellectual property management tips that will help Companies and their counsel identify and protect IP assets and address infringement issues, among other key steps.
1. Identify: Simply put, think about what patents,trademarksand copyrights you might have and categorize them appropriately. This includes ideas in development.
2. Organize: Once categorized, review the relevant creation and publication/use dates. Determineregistrationstatus. File necessary maintenance documents as appropriate and create calendar/docket future due dates for supplemental filings.
3. Monitor: Review the USPTO and Copyright office databases periodically to ensure no junior users may weaken your rights.
4. Conduct a USPTO “Basic Search”: Start your search here. Individual results pages will include direct links to the mark’s records in TARR (best way to check current status of application/mark), ASSIGN (best way to see if the mark has been assigned), TDR (best way to retrieve relevant documents), TTAB (search and review board proceedings).
5. Conduct a USPTO Document Search: Use this database to determine existence of and locate documents related to specific applications.
6. Conduct a Copyright.gov Search: This is the best place to start with any copyrightrelated questions. Includes searched for copies of registered works.
7. Google- search: Great secondary, broad-stroke search. Tends to return higher percentage of irrelevant results, but good at finding that needle-in-a-haystack type rip-off/con artist.
8. Create Google alerts: Use these to stay abreast of relevant changes in the database. Narrow alert criteria to specific keywords/phrases.
9. Conduct a State Trademark Databases Search: Don’t forget your own back yard. Search state databases for d/b/as, etc. (IL=cyberdriveillinois.com).
10. Ask you lawyer about specific concerns. Every situation is different and the only way to properly asses the risks/costs of any course of action is to discuss your matter with a competent attorney who practices in this area.
Seemingly overnight, Social media has moved from a business curiosity to an invaluable tool for customer engagement, brand positioning and employee empowerment. For example, social media use for 18-29 year olds has grown from 16% in 2005 to 89% in 2010. A recent survey, now in its third year, found that Social Media is imperative and effective to stand out in a crowded market: 88% of all marketers found that it helped increase exposure and 76% found that it increased traffic and subscriptions.
Faced with the rapid adoption of social media services and platforms, companies find themselves in a dilemma: move quickly to adapt to new technologies, or put policies in place that support marketing goals. Finding the right balance between taking appropriate business risks and minimizing legal ones is a dilemma shared by all businesses, and it can be particularly tricky in the rapidly changing realm of social media. A social media snafu could pull a business into a range of legal imbroglios, involving employment law, intellectual property rights, advertising, defamation, libel, antitrust, and privacy protection. What follows is a list of five common social media legal mistakes that businesses are making.
1. Your Company does not have a social media policy.
Social media is going through an evolution from social media to social business. Yet In the rush to avoid being left behind, some 79% of companies do not have social media policies in place. Companies and employees are becoming deep users of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, private-label platforms, and the like. Absence of a policy has led to lawsuits over basic issues such as ownership of LinkedIn profiles and Twitter followers. Lack of a policy could also lead to awkward situations that require a response, but may not rise to the level of a legal quandary such as public criticism by a volunteer or advisor.
Having a social media policy cannot prevent the occurrence of unintended consequences. However, it can address most risks that businesses will face and provide an informal framework for addressing issues that will inevitably arise before they become full-fledged emergencies that require a legal solution.
2. Your Company’s social media policy is unenforceable.
Not surprisingly, one of the most active legal areas of social media for business has been in the context of Employer-Employee relations. In 2011, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report stating that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had received 129 cases involving social media. The majority of claims concerned overly-restrictive employer social media policies or employee discipline and even termination based on use of social media.
More recently, the NLRB released updated guidance discussing 14 such cases in particular. Significantly, the NLRB criticized five employers’ social media policies, as “unlawfully overly broad” (e.g., too restrictive). In four cases, an employee’s use of Facebook to complain about their employer was held to be “protected concerted activity.” The benefit for employers is that the report frames the discussion for the appropriate scope of an enforceable social media policy.
3. Your employees don’t understand your social media policy.
For companies who have drafted a social media policy, another risk is that the employees who are engaged in social media on behalf of the company or brand do not understand the policies. Training employees about what it is, how it works and what’s expected is just the beginning.
For example, Australian telecomm company Telstra is an excellent example of social media transparency. This 40,000+ employee company mandates social media training built around a manageable policy focused on “3Rs” – responsibility, respect and representation. To promote awareness and understanding, the comic book-styled policy answers simple questions like “what is Facebook?” and more complex issues like employer criticism on personal blogs. Taking it a step further, the company published their entire social media training guide online for others to study and critique.
4. Your privacy policy is out of date.
Back in the early days of the Internet “Gold Rush,” companies raced to create an online presence complete with ecommerce storefronts. Partly due to the length of time it took to get a web site up and partly due to the fear of risks associated with ecommerce, companies made sure to implement comprehensive Terms of Use and Privacy Policies. Many have not revisited those policies since.
The risks of an outdated privacy policy are twofold. First, it may be unenforceable for any number of reasons. For example, the company has changed the way it gathers and stores information about site visitors, has changed the platforms from which it gathers such data and potentially with whom it shares such data, even unwittingly.
More importantly, the dynamics of online usage and marketing have changed. The availability of GPS data and commonly used technologies for targeted advertising and related services pose new privacy risks such as leaking personally identifiable information including usernames, email addresses, first names, last names, physical addresses, phone numbers, and birthdays. A recent series of articles by the Wall Street Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people’s computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com and found that some sites like dictionary.com had over 200 such tracking cookies.
Second, an outdated privacy policy may subject a business to scrutiny and even penalties from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). On October 12, 2011 the FTC announced a settlement with a file-sharing application developer over allegations that it used deceptive default privacy settings, which would lead consumers to unintentionally and unknowingly share personal files from their mobile device or computer with the public.
5. Your Company is Not Engaging In The Conversation.
Lastly, social media enables instantaneous, ubiquitous, electronic social interaction using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. The platforms and services that enable this interaction also provide an unfettered medium for defamatory statements about individuals, disparaging remarks about a companies’ products and services and inaccurate or misleading remarks by over-enthusiastic employees.
The legal risk is that a company often does not control such conversations which can quickly spiral out of control. Many web sites and blogs allow comments and invite participation by unrelated third parties. Having a strategy for when, how, and why to engage is critical to mitigate the legal risks since this area of law is notoriously fact and circumstances dependent and varies by jurisdiction.
Contact Us For a Consultation.
Is your business making one of the mistakes described above? Do you want to learn how to use social media to market and communicate with existing and prospective clients and do so in a way that minimizes potential risks and pitfalls? Hopefully, the guidance outlined above can serve as a good starting point for discussions about how best to use social media as well as suggestions regarding factors that firms may wish to consider in strengthening their compliance and risk management programs. We invite you to contact us with comments and requests about how we can help you educate your employees, prevent fraud, monitor risk, and promote compliance. We can be reached at lsglegal.com, 866-734-256, @adlerlaw and dadler@lsglegal.com.
The past few years have witnessed an explosion of legal and regulatory activity involving social and other new media. This session will examine several key areas, including copyright, trademark and related intellectual property concerns; defamation, obscenity and related liability; false advertising and marketing restrictions; gaming; data privacy issues presented by social media; and impacts of social media on employees and the workplace. Attendees will learn how to identify legal risks and issues before they become full-scale emergencies and how to develop appropriate policies and guidelines covering social media activity.
The RSA® Conference 2012 is coming up: February 27 – March 2, 2012 at the Moscone cEnter in San Francisco, CA.
Can’t make the Conference? Listen to the podcast here to get a sense of what you need to know.
For those of us who try to immerse ourselves in technology and more recently, Social Media, the new “kid on the block” seems to be Pinterest. According to their site, “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”
Not surprisingly, Pinterest is receiving a lot of coverage on B2B and B2C blogs that provide guidance on the how and why Pinterest can be used by business. The next logical question for me is should Lawyers use Pinterest? if so, how?
Should Lawyers Use Pinterest?
The answer to the first question is simple: Yes, if it is useful to you. Pinterest is a social bulletin board allowing users to “pin”, or save, useful information. It leverages social networks and enables users to track, organize and share products or other content discovered online. The site allows users to subdivide content by category such as travel, books or food. Finally, axiomatic of all social media is the interaction, allowing friends to follow and view your boards and comment on the items that you’ve posted, or re-pin them on their own boards.
How Can Lawyers Use Pinterest?
The answer to the second question is less simple:
Image by stevegarfield via Flickr
Simply put, Pinterest is an image content curation site where one can create “boards” to which they can add images and comments around a common theme. What’s really interesting is that once one begins using Pinterest, this pen up a whole new way to dialogue with people. Users will “re-pin” your items and it creates an opportunity to contact the user and ask what it about your content that prompted them to re-pin it.
While I am still new to Pinterest, I see it as another valuable social media tool to engage and interact with people. My Pinterest page can be found here.
The social networking service Facebook has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public. The proposedsettlement requires Facebook to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promises in the future, including giving consumers clear and prominent notice and obtaining consumers’ express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established.
Ping® by AdlerLaw A Legal Blog 