The affiliate advantage, the law
and social media

Who the heck am I?
• Andrew Girdwood
• Head of Search at bigmouthmedia
• … but also an affiliate ☺
• Supposed to put soft sales text in here
• Talk about how capable we are
• Talk about how large our European footprint is
• Talk about how we’ve never lo a football match to an affiliate
lost
network

The Law

I’m not a lawyer
• I’m not a lawyer
• I’m not a lawyer
• I’m not a lawyer
• I’m not a lawyer
• I’m not a lawyer
• I’m not a lawyer
• Link to: www.bigmouthmedia.com

What’s in this section:
• What Godfrey did to Demon
• What the Europeans did next
• The legal issues of pre or post comment moderation
• John Doe and Sparticus
• The updated Unfair Trading Act and do they know what the
internet is?
• Gambling with gambling

Dr Godfrey versus Demon Internet
• It’s 2000 and Laurence Godfrey doesn’t like what’s been said
about him on a newsgroup.
• He goes after Demon – the ISP hosting the group.
• He wins.
• He wins £15,000 but the precedent is set – hosts are
responsible for what they host.
• The result: Your web host will p your site offline first and ask
ill pull
questions later.

The Electronic Commerce Directive
• http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/e
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/e-
commerce/directive_en.htm
• One of the goals: To ensure ISPs don’t have to keep track of
everything going on in order to prevent it.

So… what happened to ebay in France?
• They got slapped for ‘allowing’ fake Louis Vuitton bags to be
sold in their auction.
• They got slapped to the tune of $64,000,000.
• That’s quite a slapping.
• How come?
• Well; it was a French Court.
• eBay does offer some ‘policing’ (the VeRo program) to try and
protect Intellectual Property Rights.
• Since they try and police it was argued that they knew and
allowed the fakes to be sold.

Blog comments and how this effects you…
• Write a blog? Run an online community?
• Run a review site?
• Post Moderation
– Comments go live without human moderation.
• Pre Moderation
– Comments only go live after a human approves it.
– (Like my blog: http://blog.arhg.net
http://blog.arhg.net)

The danger of pre-moderation
moderation
• If you pre-moderate comments or posts to your website then
moderate
you are:
– Saying you approve of all the comments on your site
– Running the risk of a Godfrey causing you trouble

Spartacus Order
• The court orders that the person
respo
ponsible for anonymous activities
must come forward and identify
themselves…
• … or be in Contempt of Court.

John Doe
• Term comes from an old 18th century
law.
• The law allows court proceedings to
begin even when the identity of one
person is unknown.
• UK lawyers like Schillings have won
here and obtained Court Orders
which would find even the likes of
Google guilty if they allowed the
‘discovery’ of sensitive information.

The Consumer Protection from Unfair
Trading Regulations Act 2008
Paragraph 11, Section 1: Using editorial content in the media
to promote a product where a trader has paid for the
promotion without making that clear in the content or by
images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer
(advertorial).
Paragraph 22, Section 1: Falsely claiming or creating the
impression that the trader is no acting for purposes relating to
not
his trade, business, craft or pro
profession, or falsely representing
oneself as a consumer.

Quack, quack, ooops!
!

Gambling - Europe
• Gambling is outside the EU ‘free trade’ agreement.
• Countries, however, can’t apply one rule to themselves and
another to other EU countries.
• EU proceedings take a looooong time.
• The effect of having gambling links on your site:
– No Google PPC activity for you (UK)
– ISPs may block all traffic to your site (Italy – currently under EU
review)

Gambling – The US
• Kentucky has won a Court order which gives them control of
141 domain names (FullTiltPower BodogLife, etc).
FullTiltPower,
• Doesn’t matter where the domains are registered.
• Doesn’t matter where the sites are hosted.
• If the site is viewable by US cit
citizens then most US laws apply.
• Sportingbet’s CEO was arrested as he arrived in New York
airport in 2006.

The Affiliate
Advantage

What’s the Affiliate Advantage?
• Affiliates are not stupid.
• Affiliates don’t tend to have a Brand Committee, HR,
Shareholders or any conflict on who’s responsible for ‘social
media’.
• Affiliates, on average, are 3,52
525% quicker to change their site
than large brands are.
• Affiliates tend to be better at so
sorting the wheat from the social
media chaff.

The Merchant Disadvantage
• Some records;
– One homepage link – 2 years
• Then it got lost in an admin update 6 months later
– One RSS feed – 1 year
• Design agency first tried to charge the bank £10,000 for it
– Adding h1 to a template – 18 months
• And they called the CSS class “SEO text”
– Decision to make use of Google Local – 7 months
• Time taken to provide the data for the feed – 1 year

New Areas to Dabble in

Virtual networking

Vir
irtual Networking
with the experts…

Affiliate Bitch
• www.affiliatebitch.co.uk

Lee McCoy
• www.leemccoy.co.uk

Kieron Donoghue
• www.here.org.uk

Keith Bond
• www.keithbond.co.uk

Traps!

It’s fun…

Dumb merchants…
“Your impression to click ratio is too low…”
- New Line Cinema @ CJ.com
• Social media can create a lot of ‘attention’ with very little
‘intention’

Dumb employers

FSA and other watchdogs
• Don’t offer finance advice
• Don’t offer medical advice
• Don’t offer legal advice

Lawyers
• There’s a risk to using sociall m
media to promote content based
on celebrities
– If it’s true: it’s copyright or private / intellectual property
– If it’s false: it’s slander or liable / defamation

Oh yeah?
Show me the
money!

• pipes.yahoo.com

Being first….
• Filter by programs

Not just PR Hubs….

Twitter Credits!
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpwillis/283144228/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigstyave/367353091/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/re
/restlessglobetrotter/2166068194/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobalt/425231402/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/iainb/162799808/

Thank you!
• Andrew Girdwood
• Andrew.Girdwood@bigmouthmedia.com
• Twitter: AndrewGirdwood
• FriendFeed: AndrewGirdwood
• Blog: blog.arhg.net