A letter to my MP over the Court of Appeal’s NLA's decision

Dear Mr Buckland.

The British economy does not need more restrictions on its most successful sectors. The internet is delivering £100 billion a year to the UK economy and needs reasonable attention to protect the opportunity it brings our citizens.

Specifically, and in this case, I am writing following the Court of Appeal’s decision on the 27 July regarding ‘temporary copying’. The decision means that many UK citizens will unwittingly infringe copyright as they use the Internet.

This situation has arisen as a result of a judgement in Newspaper Licensing Authority Ltd. (NLA) v Meltwater Group and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). Further details can be found here (http://bit.ly/oqhEoX) but the principle on temporary copies extends far beyond this case.

The ruling is such that that the process of your constituent displaying a web page on screen would be considered in law as the same as making a copy, and that anyone browsing a web page is subject to such terms and conditions. Their display of such web pages in their home or place of work is potentially, terns sight unseen, contrary to the law. 

The legal position of your constituents is thereby compromised (and most frequently, in all innocence) and the consequence is not helpful in the interests of the UK's world leading, and economically significant)  position viz a viz the internet.

Owners of web sites have many ways in which they can protect content from even the most ardent hacker as many companies in your constituency can attest. 

In the lead up to this Decision, a number of newspaper proprietors have put themselves beyond normally acknowledged protection offered to your website-publishing constituents and local enterprises. Thus the proprietors seek special pleading and potentially at the expense of Swindon people and  businesses.

For some, there is a need to protect intellectual property and to gain reward for diligent, legal and honest effort invested in content. However putting the onus on users of the Internet to avoid infringing rights sight unseen is counter-intuitive and a threat to the free use and access of the internet.

One anticipates the Hargreaves Review (http://bit.ly/e7jPxQ) will consider this special pleading by media owners and no doubt you will have a constituency interest in his findings and how he will inform the Secretary of State for Business and Intellectual Property.

Professor Bently, Emeritus of Intellectual Property, Cambridge University is of a similar mind and expresses his view here: (http://bit.ly/r9F12U)  

One understands the dichotomy of Members and legislators attempting to keep up with technological advance. In this case, being sympathetic and attempting to give long established, decaying and desperate vested interests due hearing is necessary but need not undermine the legitimate work and play of your constituents.

In this case, browsing content online must fall within a temporary copy exemption and should not require a right-holder’s prior, sight unseen, consent for reasonable use. 

Your etc

Copyright law keeps getting in the way of profit

Yahoo! , IAC/InterActive, EBay  and Facebook urged a judge to dismiss Viacom Inc.’s copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube.

The four Internet companies filed 'friend-of-the-court' briefs on behalf of YouTube at the Manhattan federal court.

“Plaintiffs’ legal arguments, if accepted, would retard the development of the Internet and electronic commerce,” Asim Bhansali, an attorney representing the four companies, said in the brief.

Viacom, which owns MTV Networks and the Paramount film studio, claimed YouTube displayed 63,000 copyrighted works on its video-sharing website without authorisation. In March, New York-based Viacom asked U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton for a summary judgment ruling in its favor.


“The courts have been clear that creating and building a web-based business on the intellectual property of others is illegal. That is exactly what YouTube did in its formative years,” Kelly McAndrew, a Viacom spokeswoman, said in an e- mailed statement. “Nothing in this case threatens the principles of the DMCA or the ability of legitimate Internet- based businesses to flourish.”

This would seem to be not much more than the mumbo jumbo of an obscure American court.

It goes much further than that.

As most will now know we have the most confused set of rules affecting the downloading of music ever. Now downloading films is easy, cheap and getting faster, the same old nonsense is being trotted out.

We have to come to  grips with the whole idea of value and copyright.

I am a right holder of lots of stuff. It is stuff I| have worked on, invented, re arranged from other more intelligent people and sometimes just fun. As far as possible I make it freely available. That is, I do not ask for payment in money.

The value I get from it is huge. I have never been so busy in my life (writing this on a Bank Holiday Saturday in between work for one of my day jobs and a new book). I am busy because I have a lot of IP out there.

Today, journalism is thriving as never before. More journalists with more content exposed to a more relevant and even more devoted readership. Publishing, as The Time is about to show us is in a mess.

There is more music, better music, bigger audiences and a wider range of genre exposed to more people that ever. Music, composers, musicians and musical markets are flourishing. Yet the music publishing industry is in a mess.

And so the story goes on and now has hit YouTube.

The law is a complete mess and the reasons for having protected IP was usurped long ago.

It is time we re-thought all this. The music, news and film industries are not national defence, education, health care and other important parts of society and we should not encourage them to be a great big part of the nanny state. It is time, as companies, that they stopped bleating and got stuck into creating wealth for their shareholders. The lack of creative management in  Viacom is a matter for its shareholders. They should have the guts to fire Philippe Dauman and replace him with a tough operator who will drop the court case and get on with extracting value from the Viacom IP.

The Next Big Thing

The development of Open Source, Open Systems and Open Access is coming to a device near you at the speed of Jensen Button with the force of the Atlantic Shuttle.

Yochai Benkler spells it out, Clay Shirky explains it well, Creative Commons, founder Lawrence Lessing has been broadcasting about it. Yahoo! did it this weekend, Google has a ton of it and yet few are prepared to explain it in newspapers. Journos just don’t get it. Tapscott and Williams put it quite clearly.

Perhaps they are limited by the poor (and out of date) descriptions in Wikipedia.

Open source, as in open source software, or public collaboration on encyclopaedia or open debate in blogs, releases capability, knowledge and insights to the world. Its free.

Open systems provide computing power, platforms and methods that can be used to re-cast and re-model information.

Open access like an Application Programming Interface (API)

The important thing is that anyone with the inclination can both access this ‘openness’ and can build on the information and capability offered to create new things.

This year the Cabinet Office started to push the idea.

OSS Watch funded by the JISC at the Oxford University Computing Services is working hard to develop UK capability.

The whole idea is controversial. It touches on the debate about copyright and trademarks, and patents.

In essence the argument goes thus:

Knowledge which is held in a walled garden is only available for further development to those in the garden. This is fine when organisations have the capability to tease out all the opportunities such intellectual properties offer. A case in point is the telecoms company BT. It had a patent that covered the concept of a Hyperlink and just could not see the huge commercial opportunity such a capability could offer the company. It was not until the hyperlink was generic to the use of the internet that it realised the benefits and by then the cat was out of the bag. Not all people in organisations have the time or imagination to bring all ideas (even patents) to market or into wider use. Indeed few companies have enough people with the time to do such things.

The alternative is to make such knowledge available to all. The creative genius of a population of enthusiasts drawn from the billion users online and their enthusiasm for new things like attempting to develop new applications, products services and knowledge is prodigious. They do have both time and enthusiasm to tease out the opportunities.

The ability of a lot of people, the commons to interact is the key.

Where organisations open up to this community of enthusiasts, the outcomes are astounding as Benkler explains in his book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (The book is online, downloadable, available as a PDF and, in printed form, a best seller – new media did not kill-off old media). With Helen Nissenbaum, he describes ‘commons based peer production as a socio-economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. “Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio-technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise.”

By standing on the shoulders of giants these people can collaborate and use existing knowledge, processes and content. Where is it’s not available, the commons size and ability to collaborate allows them to re-invent and at an incredible rate.

This is a new parallel economy and social driver. It is the next really big thing online and it affects Public Relations.

I will write a lot about this in the near future because it will be so important to PR.

What is more valueable trust or knowledge?

Slashdot announced today that

"After months of promises to IP-holders, the long-awaited filters system for YouTube has gone online. The new system will make it easier, the company claims, for copyrighted clips to be removed. 'YouTube now needs the cooperation of copyright owners for its filtering system to work, because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect so YouTube can compare those digital files to material being uploaded to its website. This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.'"

Which, of course is hard work for the copy holders and YouTube.

Why?

Because there are lots of copycat sites like YouTube where the copyright material can go, folk will get fed up with being fed what the studios let them have (Stalin would be proud) and will, eventually punish them and the bright young things will have alternative entertainment anyway.

Its a question of understanding the nature of the value of knowledge.

Knowledge is expensive to produce and has no value at all.

Making available information that some knowledge exists is expensive too and has high cost and low value associated with it.

If a person or organisation has trust assets, people might believe them if they say they have knowledge and should that knowledge be of interest, it may have some value.

What is the most valuable trust or knowledge?

Knowledge in the form of copyright such as films only has value when the recommender makes it so.

'King Kong' is a film. It has value because we trust the view of people who have seen it. Among a trillion films, there will be a need for some very powerful and much trusted recommenders to give king Kong future value. After all, now that films have a 'Long Tail' who has time to see all the movies?

Perhaps the studios and broadcasters will eventually understand that citizen critics are seriously important and will stop the idiocy of trying to protect valueless copyright.

Picture: Wikipedia

Where is the value in TV and film programmes

The punch-up between Viacom and Google reminds us how far the copyright debate has to go.

It seems to me that most people in companies have a funny idea about the value of their value systems.

Most have not read the 1994 John Perry Barlow article in Wired Magazine.

Lets take a simple example. There is a special thrill in reading good old fashioned newspapers. The paper, the layout the mix and match of style and context makes this a special experience. It is the same with magazines both consumer and B2B. There is a special relationship between a reader and the mag. Even if you read the story in a newspaper, the magazine take is different. You buy both magazines and newspapers.

The trouble is that content in newspapers (and magazines) has a limited exposure and a short shelf life. From time to time some people try to increase the reach of a story or its longevity.

They take clippings. Reading clippings is not the same as reading the original. It is sanitised and comparatively ugly. Now here is the rub. Publishers don't like people taking press clippings because they feel that this is an abuse of copyright and if someone wanted to read the article, they should buy the whole newspaper. The reality is that, with few exceptions, the value of a clipping content as an experience is not enough to prompt people to buy the newspaper. The value is just not worth it most of the time. So the publishers limit the longevity and reach of their copyright in the UK through an agency set up to do just that.

Some people read content online. Once again the story has an increased circulation and life. The experience of reading press stories online is very different to reading it in print. People read more words online (yes - that is a surprise). The content is in a different context. But publishers don't like us doing that. They want to charge subscriptions, or get at email addresses to shout at people who want to read their journalists' content (but possibly not the publishers' advertisers' content) . Alternatively, the publisher serves up advertisement and online readers will accept some of that interference in exchange for reading the editorial.

What the copyright holders find hard to understand is that these three media (and there are lots more) for their initial copyright are different experiences. The commercial model can be different too.

Trying to make copyright fit all platforms and channels for communication is stupid. The experience is different and what and how people are prepared to pay for it is different. I like listening to the verbal declamation of some newspaper journalists, as well as reading their writing in print and online and the added blog comment as well as some of the online video.

The same goes for music and video. I am listening to Guitar music (Mario Parodi - Fur Elise on Sky.fm) as I write using a headset. I could be listening to a track on my laptop in a range of formats. It is different to using earbuds, LoFi and HiFi CD players, and broadcast radio, indoor concerts, and outdoor gigs, the London Underground busker or (horrors) in a supermarket.

Like the publishers of news, publishers of music and video are just rubbish at getting the most from their copyright. They want a one stop suits all method for getting the best value from journalists or artists.

What they miss is the value of copyright. In reality it is worth nothing.

It gets value in an exchange with, guess who, you and me.

Today, its digitised and can spread and replicate and transcend platforms and channels for communication and the publisher can still have it and hold it as its own.

Keep upsetting me, I say to publishers, and I will just go somewhere else or will just break your rules and end up in court where you win the case and I win the argument.

With just a tiny bit of imagination - publishers are not renown for it - the ways of making pots of money and creating massive assets are available to all copyright holders.

When Roland Gribben says " DaimlerChrysler was born out of ego, arrogance and an element of naivety. Jürgen Schrempp, Prussian-style chief executive of Daimler Benz, was on the ego trip." Its a great statement. Here is a long standing and respected global commentator making a powerful statement. To hear that in podcast form, on YouTube or in debate, could be a much richer and added experience. The drama is everything in print and has great potential elsewhere not least in the PR exchange that always follows such statements.

Drama that a lot of people would want to exchange for real money.

It is in the morphing and Internet Agency where true value arises online. Digitisation releases information and knowledge creativity and authors from the place where copyright has its hold.

Value is in the values that go with the content and delivery channel and changing values into a new metaphor for value (OK so you want money) is a different trick altogether.

Workplace Blogging is OK

James Richards has just posted his paper on work related blogs. It is timely because today The Telegraph reports that an Englishwoman sacked for bringing her employers in Paris into disrepute by writing an internet diary under the pseudonym petite anglaise was awarded £30,000 for wrongful dismissal yesterday.

	Catherine Sanderson: 'It's really fantastic to be vindicated like this'

In a test case for bloggers in France and beyond, a tribunal concluded that Catherine Sanderson, whose blog is said by some to be the equivalent of "Bridget Jones in Paris", had been dismissed "without real and serious causes".

Her former employer, the British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson, was ordered to pay 34-year-old Miss Sanderson 44,000 euros in compensation plus 500 euros in legal fees, and to reimburse the French benefits office the equivalent of six months of wages.

Meantime, The Register reports that Blogging is part of the job.

Last week, Sony BMG UK issued a new corporate marketing strategy.

According to an official release from the group, Ged Doherty, chairman and chief executive of SonyBMG in UK and Ireland, said the company "has made it obligatory for all senior staff at both Columbia Records and RCA Records to start blogging actively".

So what happens to staff who refuse to toe the corporate line, or perhaps fail to produce the required quantity of blog blather?

The Register had to find out.

The employment lawyers are going to get rich on this.

An anti-Astoturfing regulation?

The Government has announced its acceptance of the recommendations of Peter Rogers' Review to set national enforcement priorities for local authority Environmental Health and Trading Standards services in full. The announcement was made in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget Speech. This could be an opportunity for the Chartered Institution of Public Relations to insert an anti-Astroturfing clause into the Finance Act.

Astroturfing campaigns are described by the Institute as: the practice of falsely creating the impression of independent, popular support by means of an orchestrated and disguised public relations exercise.

The Rogers Review specifically targets activities pertinent to:

Fair trading (trade description, trade marking, mis-description, doorstep selling) ... (where) people become victims of scams.

Astroturfing is a mis description where a person or organisation deliberately sets out to mis describe the efficacy of an idea, product or service through the manipulation of public media and thereby are not an accurate description of goods or services; are a mis-description and is an, often online, activity of the nature of 'doorstep' selling or a 'scam'..

The Review detail is available here.

Specifically, an anti-Astroturfing clause could re-enforce rules to 'Ensure traders describe
goods/services accurately' and do not act to deceive.

Rogers makes the point that

Fair trading is a national enforcement priority because of the huge economic damage caused by rogue trading and mis-selling and the impact on individuals, particularly the vulnerable and elderly...

Trading Standards Professionals play an important role in maintaining a fair trading environment, a level playing field that benefits all good businesses. The way they operate is as important as the policy areas they cover in supporting the outcome of economic development.

The comment in Rogers that affects Astroturfing is where he notes:

Fair trading is an example of an area where multiple bodies are involved in delivering regulatory
objectives. Partnership in Delivery:
DTI is responsible for setting the framework of consumer and competition law which lies at
the heart of UK economic policy and within which OFT and local authority Trading Standards
Services (TSS) operate. OFT’s mission is to make markets work well for consumers. To achieve
this OFT works with partners with whom it shares common objectives. Its partnership with
TSS encompasses support to help them deliver their regulatory objectives and collaboration to
deliver shared regulatory objectives. OFT provides a national perspective and a focus that
complements the local and regional perspective and focus of TSS.

The regulatory Authority would be the Office of Fair Trading with enforcement by Trading Standards Professionals, whose chief responsibilities are fair trading, consumer protection (among others).

It would be a big feather in the cap of the CIPR to get a clause added which could be a precursor to EU wide regulation.

Talking of Europe-wide legislation, which as Retail Bulletin reminds us, demands that companies only send unsolicited sales messages via email to non-customers if they have actively opted-in to receiving them. Some 30% of companies are not implementing such policies. In practice, this means that whenever someone's details are recorded they must be asked whether they want to receive subsequent sales marketing e-messages from that company or any other third party. The legislation makes it crystal clear that simply offering someone the opportunity to opt-out of receiving unsolicited emails (or indeed pre-ticking an opt-in box) does not comply with the Directive.

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There is other legislation to protects people online. The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 impose requirements on businesses that sell at a distance' i.e. sell over the Internet. These regulations require that certain information, such as the identity of the business, a full description of goods or services and the costs involved in their purchase has to be provided before a contract is completed. When buying goods or services over the Internet , consumers have a cooling off' period of seven days in which they can withdraw from a contract.

With an anti-Astroturfing regulation, we could begin to see a body of law that is practical for the practice of Public Relations.

Copyright will kill economies

Charlene Li has returned to the Viacom/Google battle over copyright. It builds on her earlier comments and broader analysis including this extract:

In the end, the Internet works because it can be indexed automatically. This is what makes Google work -- it's what makes everything from RSS to Technorati work. Those indexes drive traffic. The original owners of that content need the traffic. They just don't want to give up all their rights.

But it is transparency that is the key here. If organisations are not transparent, they loose competitive advantage and if they do not facilitate transparency they loose visibility.

The actualitie of copyright is that it is broke.

The rights over intellectual properties are important in only a few instances largely to do with protecting the weak and innocent and nothing to do with patents, process and tacit knowledge.

Herceptin needs Nice If the drug company is not able to expose its medicine to the full glare of informed public opinion, then governments have to be trusted to do the job for them.

The Google issues (Belgium Newspapers, Viacom/YouTube) are only the tip of the iceberg. The web scrapping capabilities of many web widgets and the ubiquitous use of deep linking is driving new knowledge and creating new value.

I have no doubt that in the USA, corporate America will introduce significant controls over the use and distribution of copyright material. Here is a view on that from JP Rangaswami.

In the UK things are different, you do not have to register content to own the copyright... you just have to be able to prosecute a case against someone using your content because you have automatic copyright of your works.

The EU, used to the command and control continuum from Nazi, Communists, Gaulists to Blairist, has no problem with copyright and a free and liberal exchange of intellectual property and thought is simply no more needed than the preaching of a crazed cleric or manic ayatollah or.... wait for it ... thousands of bloggers, web site scrapers, deep linkers and mashers.

The problem is that without considerable dismantling of copyright as we know it today, both corporate and national economies will become less competitive.

If you are a writer and work for the BBC, why should your work be forever hidden from view because the Corporation specifically forbids deep linking (the relevant content, I reproduce here and from this page in complete contravention to the terms and conditions laid down for the use of the site).

You may not copy, reproduce, republish, download, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use bbc.co.uk content in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use. You also agree not to adapt, alter or create a derivative work from any bbc.co.uk content except for your own personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of bbc.co.uk content requires the prior written permission of the BBC...

Of course, I have just picked on the BBC but almost every site has similar restriction.

The reason I do so is that the BBC like most organisation contradicts itself all over the place. Here is an example:

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail.

OOps! They recommend that you create a derivative work by using a an RSS reader...

Henry Jenkins makes a similar point here http://wbztv.com/video/?id=27945@wbz.dayport.com

See what I mean... the whole business is nonsense and copyright as we know it today has the capability to kill off major economies and return us back through to the command and control and slavery of past generations.

There has to be a better way.

Press Complaints Commission - Land Grab?

The BBC reports Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place "in which views bloom". But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.

He spoke during a session on free speech at a London race conference. Mr Toulmin described the phrases "free speech" and "free press" as relative terms because views expressed on the internet are still governed by laws such as libel and data protection.

Not to mention, one might add, the government of fearless people who respond on-line as well.

The 'silent majority' is not as silent as it used to be.

Tomlinson is also reported as saying: "If you want to see how the newspaper industry would look like if it was unchecked, then look at the internet."

well the Internet has now been arround for a long time and the world did not stop. so where is the rub? Or is this a land grab by the PPC to get its sticky fingers on blogs and YouTube?

Slagging-off legal in California

PC Pro reports The California Supreme Court has ruled that individuals - such as bloggers - who use the Internet to distribute information from another source may not be held to account if the material is considered defamatory. This is a reversal of a previous lower court decision.

The ruling supports federal law that clears individuals of liability if they transmit, but are not the source of, defamatory information. It expands protections the law gives to Internet service providers to include bloggers and activist Web sites.

'We acknowledge that recognizing broad immunity for defamatory republication on the Internet has some troubling consequences,' California's high court justices said in their opinion.

'Until Congress chooses to revise the settled law in this area, however, plaintiffs who contend they were defamed in an Internet posting may only seek recovery from the original source of the statement,' the decision stated.

The law in Europe is NOR the same - don't defame.

Copy wrong - a report for (PM in waiting) Gordo

Silicon.com's Tim Ferguson writes that some copyright laws are as much as 300 years old and their legal interpretation means consumers who copy CDs and DVDs in order to transfer them to their iPods or equivalent media players are breaking the law.

Kay Withers, who researched and compiled a report for the Institute for Public Policy Research
told silicon.com this is a "key immediate issue for consumers" as "IP law affects absolutely everyone". She added that copyright law needs to be updated to come in line with public preferences for the way media is consumed.

The recommendations are aimed at a review of intellectual property which was set up by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, last year and is due to report its findings in next week.

There is a great case for significant lostening of control. Very little copyright material has any value. Mostly it is a vehicle for creating value. A new legal structure that recognised copyright as the vehicle for creating value would be a big step forward.

THE DOUBLE PARADOX

This is a case study from 1999. It is still relevant today:

It was a chill morning in London on October the 16 1986 and a day that was to create
one of the pivotal events in Internet Activism. It was the day when a campaign was
started to put McDonalds in the centre of anti-corporatism by a number of activists.

It gave rise to the longest civil court case in history between David Morris and Helen
Steel and McDonald's.

The appearance of a Web site created by the activists, came in February 1996 when
Morris and Steel launched the McSpotlight site from a laptop connected to the
internet via a mobile phone outside a McDonald's store in Central London. The
Website was accessed more than a million times in its first month. It was headline
news across the world.

By any standards, the McSpotlight site is big and has an amazing amount of content.
A large part of the content is critical of McDonald's and some is allegedly libellous.

£60,000 settlement against Morris and Steel, the Web site was accessed 2.2 million
times.

The first paradox is that McDonald's won the court case but the allegations are still on
the Web site available to this day (and is mirrored across the world so that if it is
turned off in one country, its content can be accessed from another).

The second paradox is that with so much criticism about the company available for all
to see, the company remains one of the most successful food retailers in the UK and
across the world. McDonald's ten years after the court case was the largest and best-known global foodservice retailer it had more than 24,500 restaurants in 116 countries. Its share price was four time higher than when the McSpotlight site was launched and dividends per share were up 44%.

It there a linkage between corporate performance and Internet criticism? Will there be
a link as the Internet expands?

There are a number of considerations. The first is that all this happened a long time
ago. In 1997, at the end of the court case and 18 month after the launch of
McSpotlight, the on-line population was 57 million (in 1999 it was 179 million) of which
only 960,000 were in the UK (over 10 million in 1999)

Today, the McSpotlight site is really a gateway site for people who are interested in
anti-corporate activism. Compared to many other activist issues, McDonalds is a
relative side show.

McDonalds significance for most people is its brand strength. It is a company that
delivers on its promise (caviar no, fries yes, silver service no, in a box with a paper
tissue yes). In this respect it is trusted by consumers.


The apparent double paradox is, in fact a matter of timing and the fast changing
dynamic of the Internet.

The Consumer Opinion pages of Yahoo show a list of rogue sites which reputation
managers should visit to see examples of what may affect them at any time.
Smaller brands in a virtual community ten times as big, may not be so lucky. So just
when should a company get scared of the Internet?

There is a lot to take out of this.

Critically, there is an issue of the real effect of activism on reputation and the effect of reputation on the value of companies.

Is the effect of the internet on markets more potent today than ten or even six years ago?

Do the financial markets reflect the trading patterns of companies under pressure from Internet activism?

Is there a parallel for, say Dell and in the blogging era.

Perhaps its time to re-visit the effects of on-line activism.

Don't mess with the soccer barons

A football fan site that has links to YouTube showing Premiership goals has been told to stop this practice, according to reports.

NetResult, the company monitoring internet activity for the Premier League has warned the website 101greatgoals.blogsport.com to not put any more links on the site.

See also http://www.copyrightcontrol.com/

Links to YouTube land blog in hot water - www.ihotdesk.com/...

Passing off - the Edelman story

Richard Edelman today issued an apology for his agency's role in creating a blog for client Wal-Mart that did not properly disclose its origins or funding says Brand Republic.

The blog, walmartingacrossamerica.com, chronicled a couple's journey across the country in an RV while stopping at various Wal-Mart parking lots. Although the blog did not initially bear any clear disclosures outside of an advertisement, the trip was funded by the group Working Families for Wal-Mart [WFWM], a Wal-Mart-backed organization designed to promote a positive portrayal of the company. The group is part of Edelman's effort to turn around the reputation of the controversial retailer.

Richard Edelman posted a statement of apology for the incident on his personal blog on Edelman's website today.

"For the past several days, I have been listening to the blogging community discuss the cross-country tour that Edelman designed for Working Families for Wal-Mart," the statement said. "I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client's."

Edelman went on to say his agency supports the transparency guidelines of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association [WOMMA], which call for disclosure of the source of such efforts.

The fact is that, 'passing off' is bad practice, transparency is essential and both Edelman and WalMart know this and both are culpable. There is no excuse. It is, as Edelman says, an error. It is also bad practice and reflects on the professionalism of the profession. In the UK Asda was acquired by Wal-Mart and would hope its PR team is more professional.

In the UK this form of practice is banned by the CIPR code of conduct. It may also be illegal anyway.

When Colin Farrington comes out of his six month purdah and it will not be soon enough for CIPR to ask its lawyers the nature of the legal position. Certainly in election law passing ones self off as another candidate or representing a participant is not legal and there is a lot of consumer law that would make miss-representation illegal as well.

Law reins in wild webbers

Sydney Morning Herald has a headline that applies to you!

BLOGGERS beware: thoughtless musings in cyberspace can have costly consequences.

That's one lesson that might be gleaned from a Florida jury's decision last week to order a Louisiana woman to pay $US11.3 million ($15.2 million) in compensation, after she used an internet forum to accuse another woman of being a con artist and a fraud. The damages award is believed to be the largest relating to amateur postings on the internet.

Who own your copyright?

The intellectual property question of ownership of material submitted to social media sites is heating up as corporate acquisition talks for YouTube and other startups catch fire, says BL Ochman.

She has some very interesting points such as: "Interestingly, you don't own the rights to material you submit to video contests, or to YouTube, but you do own the rights to coding you do at Second Life."

She adds: As Mark Cuban ever so succinctly puts it: "The copyright shit is going to hit the lawsuit fan."

The market for real goods created from the digital objects coded in virtual reality could be enormous in a virtual world like Second Life, where the creators own the rights to the objects that they make, Michael Buckbee told Wired

Robin Good says of participatory sites like YouTube, MySpace: "While paying lip service to the democratic, free sharing of information, then, services like YouTube reserve the right to co-opt, edit, repackage and sell on the citizen produced media that they distribute."

As always, there is more good stuff on her post.

Mean time Shaun Woodward suggests new technology is the key to beating movie piracy, the UK film minister has told industry executives reports the BBC.

Making films available on demand as soon as they are released at cinemas could help stop fans watching illegal copies, Shaun Woodward said.

"The real answer is in the technology," he told the BBC News website, citing the success of legal music downloads.

There is another issue and that is the differences that will emerge between interpretations of copyright between countries and cultures. At present the big moves are in the USA next I guess will be Europe but when these things get to the authorities in the Middle East and China, there is a whole different culture and a few billion people who are not going to sign up to copyright as we know it.

Blog but don't Libel

Net neutrality - its important

Dear Colin. Can you add this to the agenda for urgent action on the Internet front:

In the New York Times of September 27 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, advocates “Net neutrality,” or limiting Internet service providers’ control over information.

[thanx to Gerrit Visser for the heads up]

Q. Is your view that the anti-Net neutrality infrastructure actually threatens political democracy? Does it go beyond just the technical structure of the Internet?

A. Net neutrality is one of those principles, social principles, certainly now much more than a technical principle, which is very fundamental. When you break it, then it really depends how far you let things go. But certainly I think that the neutrality of the Net is a medium essential for democracy, yes — if there is democracy and the way people inform themselves is to go onto the Web.

Q. So there are political consequences. Are there are also economic consequences? If so, what are they?

A. I think the people who talk about dismantling — threatening — Net neutrality don’t appreciate how important it has been for us to have an independent market for productivity and for applications on the Internet.

(..)

Q. Do you have a view about the behavior of the telephone companies in this debate? Is this simply traditional monopolist behavior, or is it more subtle? Have you talked to them to understand their motivations?

A. I have tried, when I’ve had the opportunity to find out, to understand their motivations, but I can’t speak for them. So all I can do is guess. But my guess is that it’s not that this is a nefarious planned plot to take over the Internet by a bunch of people who hate it. What I imagine is that it is simply the culture of companies, which have been using a particular business model for a very long time. So I think there is a clash of corporate cultures.

Emerging blog law

Gradually we are getting legal advice about blogging.
In this case for the USA and covering employee blogging Law.com offers some insights.
It wouls seem that there is not much to stop and employee blogging and not musch more to stop the employee posting about thier employer.

Cultural Organisations - can they now be free?

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, He notes on his blog:

The British Council and Counterpoint has a new publication, “Unbounded Freedom: A Guide to Creative Commons Thinking for Cultural Organizations,” written by Rosemary Bechler. The book will be launched Friday. There’s a discussion page on the author’s blog, which begins with a useful post addressing the question: “So why did I choose to licence my work in this way?”