As part of one of my courses, Law of Advertising and PR, I was invited to attend a conference on ‘The Changing Face of Media Law’ at Kent State’s Stark Campus yesterday morning. While this counted as CLEs for practicing lawyers and provided great insight to the attendees in various news media fields, I learned a few things as well.
We just covered copyright issues in class and are now moving into corporate speech, so the first panel discussion I sat through, ‘Copyright, Trademark and the Internet,’ was a nice review and also brought up some public relations challenges I haven’t had to face just yet.
- Copyright: Rights and Exemptions- Although the copyright owner has the right to distribute, perform publicly and create derivative works from the copyrighted material, other parties are only allowed limited access as an exemption under the Fair Use policy. This allows for the reproduction of copyright materials for the purpose of comment, criticism or parody. Our presenter, Jeffrey Samuels, a professor at the University of Akron School of Law, also mentioned that factual work receives less protection under Fair Use than fiction, and that the reason behind the use is also a factor. (i.e. Using that copyright for commercial purposes receives little protection under Fair Use.)
Why does this matter? Well, I found out that blogging is actually a perfect example of a public relations forum specifically asking for trouble with copyright issues. Using large amounts of copyright material, or even small thumbnail images that are not yours can be a copyright infringement, and I didn’t realize that attribution is only a defense to plagiarism, not copyright.
Blogging follows the guidelines of transparent information flow with linking and attributing at the heart of it all, but service providers like WordPress have to address copyright issues all the time. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act limits service providers from some copyright infringement suits because they are simply providing a forum, not the actual infringing activity, but it is still their responsibility to remove said content if asked or they could face real trouble.
With the move to open, two-way communication methods being employed by corporations everywhere, I see public relations professionals getting the job of monitoring those discussions. I don’t pretend to know all the details, and if I were put in that position I would definitely be visiting my corporation’s legal department to learn more about what kind of potential troubles could ensue.
I’m all about blogging for business as long as I know all the legal repercussions of that tactic. It would be a bad PR strategy to just play it safe and not allow for any discussion, but I wouldn’t suggest inviting a crisis either.
