Social Media: Risks & Rewards – Compliance Building

Intellectual Property and Social Media

This afternoon I am at the Harvard Club in New York City participating in Social Media: Risks & Rewards, an Incisive Media event. These are my notes from this session. Now that you are in social media, how do you deal with trademark and copyright issues? How do you protect them?

Speakers:

Valerie L. Boccadoro, Senior Intellectual Property Counsel of Toys R Us
Lesley Rosenthal, Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.
Robert Ambrogi, Attorney of Law Office of Robert Ambrogi

Bob started off with a 12 part copyright quiz.

Linking is not copyright infringement
If it does not say it’s copyrighted, it’s not protected. False.
As long as someone uses only uses an except they are free to republish it as fair use? False.
If a material is copied for non-commercial use, it okay? No.
A tweet is not protected by copyright law? False.
If it’s old, I am free to use it. False.
I am not liable for copyright infringement committed by others on my site. False (There are protections to the site owner, but you need to meet the specific requirements.)
As the publisher I am free to grant permission to use material posted on my site. False. The writer holds the copyright.
If I paid for it to be created, I own the copyright. False. This is subject to the “work for hire rules.”
The copyright owner retains control of material posted to a social networking. False. (Although it may depend on the site and its term of service.)
If it’s under a creative commons license, it is free to reuse. False. Creative commons is just a licensing structure.
If material is posted anonymously, it is not copyright protected. False. The creator still holds the copyright.

Valerie was up next. Social media does not create any new rights. But things do move faster. There are things that they should do. First, you should do site sweeps, checking out sites and see how people are using your trademarks. The second step is to consider whether to enforce the trademark against the third party. Valerie provided a series of legal issues to consider and business issues to consider. The third step is report problems to the sites. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have procedures for dealing with these issues. The fourth step is the traditional enforcement. Start with asking before bringing in the lawyers. The reality is that you cannot stop all infringement.

Last up was Lesley. She pointed out that non-profits have many of the same issues as businesses. She focuses on educating the people in her organization. Lincoln Center has several Facebok pages and Twitter handles. They are experiencing astronomic growth in fans and followers. They have lots of focus on clearing rights in their publications. You need to enforce or you risk abandonment of the mark.

Social Media Best Practices

This afternoon I am at the Harvard Club in New York City participating in Social Media: Risks & Rewards, an Incisive Media event. My second panel presentation is Social Media Best Practices. (My morning presentation was Develop your Company’s Corporate Policy for Social Media.)

I was joined on the panel by:

John Lipsey, Vice President Corporate Counsel Services of LexisNexis, acting as the moderator
Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks
Eugene Weitz, soon to be former Corporate Counsel of Alcatel-Lucent
Daniel Goldman, Legal Counsel of Mayo Clinic

Unlike the earlier presentations which focused on what the company should be doing, this panel is focusing on how the individual lawyers in the audience could use social media to help them.

Here is the slide deck we are using:

Social Media Best Practices

View more presentations from Doug Cornelius.

Vanessa will be starting off with some highlights from her 2009 Networks for Counsel Study. (A Global Study of the Legal Industry’s Adoption of Online Professional Networking, Preferences, Usage and Future Predictions.)

Then Dan spends some time leading the discussion about Twitter.

I take over and talking about blogging as a personal knowledge management tool. You can get some sense of what I am going to say if you read Why I Blog.

Eugene then focuses on online professional networking. (He hates the term social networking.) He makes a case why it is particularly useful for in-house counsel.

We end with a discrete set of takeaways for the audience.

I plan to present two takeaways. First, listen to what people are saying about you and your company. Set up a Google news search and a Google blog search for your name and your company’s name. Second, use a blog as a personal knowledge management tool.

Vanessa has a great 20 minute action plan.

Your Business and the Social Media Sensation

This morning I am at the Harvard Club at the Social Media: Risks & Rewards conference. The line-up for this panel:

Moderator: Monica Bay, Editor-in-Chief of Law Technology News
Michele Mitchell, VP of Audience Development and Retention of NBC Universal
Cheryl Givner, Managing Counsel Worldwide Marketing & Core Products of MasterCard Worldwide
Nicole Black, Of Counsel Fiandach & Fiandach
Andy Mitchell, VP Digital Marketing and Marketing Development of CNN Worldwide

Cheryl started off look at corporate brands in social media. Her first point was the United Breaks Guitars video complaint. Over 5.5 million people saw this and created a viral backlash against United. MasterCard runs a lot of analytics on what people are saying about the company. They just launched a Twitter feed: @MasterCardNews.

Niki emphasized the need for goals. But at the minimum, you need to know the basics of how these tools work. Then she moved on to the benefits of some of the major social media tools. She emphasized that professional networking and personal/social networking overlap. (Aren’t some of your professional colleagues also your friends?) People want to connect with a person when dealing with legal services.

Niki also pointed out that if you”lawyer-up” when you are subject to negative social media attention you are likely to increase the negative publicity. Demanding that someone remove criticism of your company is more likely to backfire.

Andy took the microphone to discuss how CNN has been using social media and how they involve their audience. There was the first presidential Twitter debate last year. CNN moved on to Facebook and took advantage of the Facebook Connect tool. The first test of their use of Facebook was one of the vice-presidential debate (“Debate the Debate”). CNN was out on the cutting edge of these tools for a mainstream media company. They generate tremendous traffic, updates and views. He made a strong case for how much consumers want to engage with brands. “Give up some control of your brand (But not so much that you risk harming your brand)”

Michele focused on social media trends. She emphasized the importance of a feedback loop. After all the ability to easily connect with consumers is a key way to leverage social media.

There was a question from the audience that emphasized the need to engage the legal department in developing the tools. An example was a marketing promotion for a hashtags sweepstakes and free shipping special. It ended up with a complaint from a state attorney general.

My first presentation is scheduled right after this one. I already published the outline and materials for the event: Develop your Company’s Corporate Policy for Social Media.