This document summarizes key legal considerations for using social media for marketing as an attorney or law firm. It discusses intellectual property issues like trademark infringement and keyword usage. It also examines risks like violating attorney conduct rules regarding client confidentiality, solicitation, conflicts of interest and more. Best practices include having clear social media policies, disclaimers, and avoiding formation of attorney-client relationships online without a written engagement.
Matt Asbell (random dude) Matthew Dechtiar Asbell (friendly dude) Matthew Asbell (professional dude)
Self-Promotion Items of Interest (that you want to be identified with) Brand Affirmation Forum for Others to engage with and enhance your brand. In short: IDENTITY FORMATION & INTERMEDIATION NOTE: “Pages” for companies or products may be connected to personal or business accounts. If a Page is created via a personal account, that person is the OWNER of the Page. Business account have lesser access to alter the Page. (develop)
Find/Be Found SHOW DON’T TELL Opportunity to be intelligent and helpful without blatantly soliciting
A Medium to Other Media Promotional: presents firm members in positions of authority and credibility. Brand Building: Links to articles and other items of client interest. Maybe give random bits of legal insight to pique interest and stimulate curiosity. Funnel: use those achievements and insights to pull users into the site. Relationship: once in the firm's site, users can begin to develop comfort and trust.
Branding: Plenty of room to post tutorials, give illustrations. Show knowledge, convey expertise and wit, likeability, etc… Work it into specialist series.
Still answering Should I? Kinds of Intellectual Property that is created on virtual worlds and social networking sites – copyrights, trademarks, patents, domain names etc. For instance, trademark owners are becoming increasingly aware of the opportunities and challenges to their brand in virtual worlds like Second Life. Some brand owners have established an online presence by building retail stores in Second Life to sell products in the real world e.g. Toyota, Dell and Reebok have decided to expand into the “digital marketplace” by opening their own online stores and choosing to make use of the site for advertising purposes.”
REGISTRATION IN THE REAL WORLD: Before the contemplating signing up for virtual worlds, it is crucial to register your trademarks, copyrights and patents. READ THE FINE PRINT: Facebook, Second Life – they all have terms of use. It is crucial to carefully view these license to know your rights and ALSO others. Understand the terms of service of each site Usually the media platform will claim a grant of a non-exclusive license of all your intellectual property. These licenses are also sub-licensable and enforceable world wide, without any royalty fees. E.g., Facebook, Statement of Rights and Responsibilities Platforms such as Second Life permit content providers to retain ownership of their intellectual property. Content owners may enforce their IP and it is crucial to stay ahead of the curve by carefully reading the terms of each license adopted. Recently, Worlds.com sued NCSoft in the U.S. District Court of Texas for violating its patent which is described as a method for enabling users to interact in the virtual world through avatars. Second Life recently proposed its Content Management Roundup wherein it discussed its policies to promote awareness of intellectual property rights on Second Life, to improve its intellectual property claims process, to provide tools that permit content to be copied from Second Life and transferred to a stand-alone-behind-the-firewall Second Life solution, without facilitating copyright infringement. For more information, please visit https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/08/04/our-content-management-roadmap
e.g- Hasboro – scrabulous ended up changing its name Infringement Content Nature Defamatory , objectionable & commercial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by others because the providers are not considered publishers under the Act. Thus, if a user posts defamatory or otherwise illegal content, Section 230 shields the social network provider from any liability arising out of the publication. Websites that, in whole or in part, create or develop contested information, on the other hand, are deemed "content providers" that do not benefit from the protections of Section 230. Therefore, it is crucial that employee do not post such defamatory or objectionable information as the liability would befall the Company and not the service providers. Amount Copyrighted, de minimis The social networking sites are protected from any liability associated with featuring any copyrighted materials, provided they do not profit from it and if they provide their members with a mechanism for removing the content when and if they terminate their own accounts. Again, employees that post materials that is protected by intellectual property laws, would have to bear liability. Section 512, DMCA Transparency – how much is divulged in terms of trade secret The disclosure of certain trade secrets can destroy the "confidential" status of the information, and the disclosure of a third party's confidential information could lead to an action for trade secret misappropriation or intellectual property infringement. Also, misstatements or misrepresentations about a competitor could lead to claims of trade libel. Comparative Advertising: Is an advertisement in which a particular product, or service, specifically mentions a competitor by name for the express purpose of showing why the competitor is inferior to the product naming it. "Tarnishment " generally arises when the plaintiff's trademark is linked to products of shoddy quality, or is portrayed in an unwholesome or unsavory context likely to evoke unflattering thoughts about the owner's product. In such situations, the trademark's reputation and commercial value might be diminished because the public will associate the lack of quality or lack of prestige in the defendant's goods with the plaintiff's unrelated goods, or because the defendant's use reduces the trademark's reputation and standing in the eyes of consumers as a wholesome identifier of the owner's products or services. When commenting on social networking sites, a post may tarnish another’s trademark if without due diligence a comparison is made to products that are not associated with the trademark and are inferior in quality. Trademark fair use – T.B.D Third Party Contribution: Situations where third parties, such as consumers, post another’s protected intellectual property material on your website. For instance, a copyrighted music video. How does one address that? A company policy on ‘notice and take down’ is therefore essential for combating such situations.
Preventive Steps: Preemptively register the mark and potential domain names with each site FACEBOOK: Since each page may have only one corresponding username, owners of multiple marks must establish a separate page or profile for each username they wish to register. Since this process could be time-consuming and costly to owners of large portfolios of marks, such owners may wish to prioritize those marks best positioned to take advantage of social networking services, including Facebook and Twitter. Monitor, Monitor, Monitor Monitor sites to determine if the trademark is being used without permission. Use tools such as: Internal monitoring Third party vendors Law firm monitoring Report alleged infringement to the social networking site FACEBOOK: In the event that a third party on Facebook adopts a potentially infringing username before the legitimate owner does so, the legitimate owner may submit an Intellectual Property Infringement Claims form (available http://www.facebook.com/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1). This somewhat open-ended claim requires notice of the allegedly infringing username(s), the rights infringed, and a description of the nature of the infringement. The target of the claim may thereafter appeal an adverse decision by Facebook to delete or transfer its username. While the burden on the mark owner is clearly high under the Infringement Claim, it remains to be seen how much support Facebook will actually require before taking action. TWITTER: Twitter does not yet have a formal, trademark infringement claim form, although it does provide Copyright infringement claim guidelines similar to Facebook's Infringement Claim. Considering Twitter's Tony La Russa case and last year's eBay v. Tiffany case, rights holders can reasonably expect "notice-and-takedown"-type compliance by social networking services, in a manner analogous to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's notice-and-takedown provision. However, as stated earlier, rights holders will continue to bear the burden of policing their marks. Develop P&P for use of sites by employees What to post (and NOT to post) on company’s behalf Guidelines for personal use Develop and implement anti-counterfeiting programs Insurance considerations Dispute Settlement: Despite Facebook's and Twitter's official intellectual property protection policies, it remains unclear what standard will be used to settle disputes. For example, under Facebook's Infringement claim, there is no explicit requirement for an owner to state the relationship between the goods or services in a registration and the content shown on a third party's Facebook page. Similarly, there is no express requirement that trademark owners demonstrate a commercial "trademark use" on the allegedly infringing page associated with the username. How responses to the open-ended queries on the claim form will be addressed and which party, if either, will be entitled to a presumption of ownership remains unclear. In any event, both Facebook and Twitter reserve the right to remove and/or reclaim any username or account at any time for any reason.
The burden of proving infringement/confusion is on the trademark owner. OSP is largely shielded by Communications Decency Act. It's often in the interest of the OSP to give its members the benefit of the doubt--their numbers generate ad revenue. Suing somehow proved fairly effective in several cases.
The Real Shaq: 3million followers; “Verified User” Account; Superman Logo Fake Shaquille O’Neal: 5,000 followers.
What is it? Keyword Advertising is a marketing tool that is used through search engines. When a consumer enteres a keyword, advertisements associated with that keyword all appear on the results page. Therefore, purchasing a keyword is seen as an important tool to target ads to consumers. In other words, when an advertiser purchases, from a search engine, certain terms or keywords that correspond to its product or service, a potential customer searching with that keyword in the search engine will be directed to the advertiser’s website. Keyword advertising is based on a principle of search engine optimization, which states that the anchor text of incoming hyperlinks to a site will cause search engines to associate the site with that term and improve the site's search engine ranking for that keyword . (Source: wiki).
Ari’s milk example from gmail
NY Comp. Codes R. & Regs., tit. 22, s. 1500.50(c) prohibits: (1) testimonials from clients with respect to matters that are still pending; (2) ads including or portraying fictitious firms; (3) techniques to get attention and demonstrate lack of relevance to selection of counsel; (4) nicknames that imply success;
CLE webcast: Ethical Implications of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World