Dream Systems Media Blog

Caution: Follow Me At Your Own Risk

Recently, an episode of “Staffers Gone Wild” played out on the internet with the unbelievable tweets of government staff members being broadcast for all to see. Isn’t it comforting to know that your hard earned tax dollars are being spent to fund the watching of Nirvana videos or support drinking while on the job? I’m not here to talk about the politics of this behavior, as I will leave that up to the political pundits to comment on.

What I do want to talk about are some potential legal ramifications that exist in businesses with easy access to the thousands of open eyes and ears reading your posts and tweets. We all know that social media marketing, imaging, and messaging are extremely important in shaping your brand. It takes a lot of time and money to get others to see you as you want them to. However, with one simple tweet your whole plan and message can be compromised, leaving you open to liabilities and harming your brand. Additionally, there are a host of legal pitfalls awaiting you.

Legal Social Media, social media policies

As an attorney, I am often asked my opinion as to how people should go about resolving legal disputes.  This info-graphic created by Nielsen & Senior (a Utah law firm) does a good job of walking one through the pros and cons of the three legal dispute resolutions (mediation, arbitration, and litigation).  Now you know!

Legal, Legal Resources mediation vs. arbitration, mediation vs. litigation, utah law firm

Back in February I was asked to sit down with Mike McDonald of WebproNews to discuss the FTC’s new Internet endorsement guidelines. We also got into some of the new state “privacy laws” being passed (by Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Nevada) requiring encryption of sensitive personal data and more informative privacy policies.

I haven’t heard anything from the crew at WPN  since our interview, but woke up today to a picture text message from Mat Siltala today of my face on the video homepage of WPN (see http://videos.webpronews.com/).  Thanks Mat!

It appears that the production crew has added in some ancillary video and written a nice summary of our  interview. Feel free to check it out – David Mink on FTC Guidelines!

Watch the video here:

More WebProNews Videos

David Mink, Legal David Mink, ftc blogging guidelines, ftc endoresement guidelines

As you know, “co” is the standard abbreviation for company and .co will soon be available as a top level domain (“TLD”)! Up until now, this TLD has only been available within Colombia as the country’s ‘code’. This new TLD will provide a big traffic opportunity for business owners and search marketers as .co is a very common misspelling of .com.

Dates for registration

From April 26 to June 10 registered trademark owners will have the exclusive ability to register the new .co TLD for their registered trademark. (Needless to say, if you own a protected term you will certainly want to register it during this period!) After that protected period general public registration of .co TLD’s will begin in July.

Summary

The .co opportunity = additional traffic and brand management.
The .co risk = a cybersquatter registering your company’s trade name or marks before your do.
The goal = securing your company’s .co opportunity.

David Mink, Legal .co, .co top level domain, new top level domains

Follow me on Twitter for micro updates: @atraine.

Legally Speaking: Recent Legal News About Search – What’s up with legal issues and search engines? That’s what this session is about – filling you in on the always changing developments. From click fraud to copyright to privacy, this session will hit all the major areas that are seeing legal action. Sit back – court is in session!

Moderator: Sarah Bird, General Counsel, SEOmoz.org, Inc.

Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Director, Search Strategies

Speakers:

Travis Crabtree, Member, Looper Reed & McGraw, P.C.
Eric Goldman, Professor, Santa Clara University School of Law
David Mink, Chief Legal Counsel for Dream Systems Media, Dream Systems Media

Travis Crabtree Speaking at SMX

Clarke Walton, Attorney-at-Law, Walton Law Firm

NOTES:

Travis Crabtree, Member, Looper Reed & McGraw, P.C.
Topic: Trademark Law for Internet Marketing

David Mink, Legal, SMX SMX, SMX West

The question is: Do individuals who post personal information on publicly available Web sites have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their identity? This same question was asked earlier this year in Sandler v. Calcagni, a case out of the District Court of Maine.

The facts condensed

Two high school friends/cheerleaders have a falling out that turns nasty. Their bickering leads to school suspensions, criminal mischief conviction, and eventually Calcagni enters a consent degree for a civil hate crime prosecution.

Calcagni’s parents believe their daughter was wronged so they launch a media campaign, which involved writing and publishing the book through Booksurge, to try and right the wrong. The book contained private information about Sandler.

Sandler sues Calcagni and a few others including Booksurge for defamation, privacy invasion, etc.

–Today I will only address Booksurge’s motion for summary judgment, which is simply their effort to get out of the lawsuit before it goes to trial–

David Mink, Legal, Social Media expectation of privacy

Last night, DSM had the unfortunate experience of learning that an independent contractor we were using for content creation was allegedly pirating other writer’s work. This incident has caused me to spend some time training the DSM staff as to what they can do to both prevent copyright violations and to police intellectual property use on the Internet. I thought I would pass on some of the tips I have shared with them. Let’s start with a short and very incomplete copyright tutorial.

START OF TUTORIAL

What is a copyright? It is an intellectual property protection for certain “expressive” works, including: music, art, poetry, writing, movies, and much more. In order for the work to be copyrighted the following criteria must be met, the work must:
1. Be original
2. Result from a creative effort on behalf of the author, artist, or originator
3. Be in a physical form, or a “tangible medium of expression”

David Mink, Legal policing copyright violations, preventing copyright violations

The Trend Micro blog writes that their are numerous fake celeb profiles on LinkedIn which contain links to malware. Bogus profiles of Beyonce Knowles, Kate Hudson, Salma Hayek, and others contain “tempting” links to see these stars naked. Once a user clicks on the link “he will end up on different malicious Web sites trying the classical social-engineering tricks of either the ‘missing video codec’ or of showing a fake AV scan and telling the user (that) his computer was infected with malware and offering a ‘free’ AV scanner software, which in fact is the real threat,” says the McAfee blog. See the following screen shot:

It appears that LinkedIn has been working to take down most of these bogus profiles since it was called out by Trend Micro on Monday (1/5/09). (If you go Google “Salma Hayek LinkedIn” you will see that the page did exist but is no longer available.) Good move as this kind of activity by spammers, malware authors, and other cybercriminals raises many legal issues including social media cybersquatting and possible defamation and trademark claims.

David Mink, Legal, LinkedIn cybersquatting, LinkedIn, Social Media

Cybersquatting (don’t you just love that word?) is defined by Wikipedia as:

Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

Cybersquatting costs legitimate businesses untold amounts of money. It is about time one of us cost them some money!

Verizon just won over $33 million dollars in a cybersquatting lawsuit!

Verizon just struck a big blow for legitimate trademark and business owners everywhere when they won a record $33.15 million judgment against Internet domain registrar OnlineNIC for cybersquatting. That is A LOT of cash!

David Mink, Legal cybersquatters, cybersquatting

I received the following ‘hypothetical’ question by email this week. (*Disclaimer: This is a hypothetical question receiving a general information answer.)

The Question:

“If a person has an email list, about say classic trucks, and then that person hit’s the list with an affiliate promotion for a marketing product; Is that spam?”

I believe the question the reader is getting at is – Can people send non related offers (i.e. marketing product offer to a classic trucks enthusiasts list) to opt in lists?

The Answer:

It depends. The classic lawyer answer! OK, I will do better than that. With SPAM the answer almost always comes down to what is the purpose of the email. To arrive at that conclusion you should evaluate the following:

1. How were the addresses acquired?

David Mink, Legal CAN SPAM ACT