OPEN

I seem to have seen a lot of legal issues around connected media this week.

I stopped by a firm of specialist media lawyers on Wednesday to discuss the evolution of social media. They’re the kind of guys you call if you’re a celeb who’s about to appear on the front page of a tabloid in a compromising position – they use the power of the law to stop the presses at 10 at night and gag errant editors…

But what do they do when the same story hits gossip-aggregator We Smirch first? There was a lot of scribbling on legal pads when I raised that question.

Also, when running a series of workshops for colleagues in the Bell Pottinger Group, there were a good few questions about legal issues, especially, as it happens about podcasts. Something Emily Bell is also thinking about in the Guardian comment piece I referred to in the last post:

Thus far, podcasts are not under the auspices of media regulator Ofcom, and it
is not clear that they would be self-regulated by the Press Complaints
Commission, either. Therefore issues such as bias, loose language, undue
commercial prominence and the plugging of sponsors’ products are not prohibited
as they would be under the stringent rules which apply to radio licences. Anyone
can podcast anything. I leave the gratuitous Volvo mention to one side,
but I can’t help feeling that this is one area where regulators will spot a job
creation opportunity.

She’s right. Regulators, lawyers and the rest are giving this subject serious thought at the moment. But as well as being looser in some areas, others are interpreting laws stringently.

A broadcast comms specialist told me this week that it can’t include clips from radio shows in podcasts for clients, even a soundbite of their client being interviewed. The BBC department responsible for approving clip-use elsewhere has a massive back-log and she was not prepared to expose her clients to potential copyright challenges.

Sounds like an area where the law will need to catch up with podcasting.

Watch out for freedoms being challenged. Watch out for more perhaps over-zealous prosecutions…

If blogs, message boards and chat-rooms are to be subject to the same laws as professional journalists then there’s going to need to be more education for everyone about their ethical responsibilities and legal liabilities when they start bashing their keyboards about whatever…

PRs aren’t generally versed in basic media law, unlike professionally trained journalists. They may need to at least know the basics on libel, slander, copyright etc. soon, as more and more organisations start to create and distribute their own content and PRs are in charge of producing them.

I also got some interesting advice on legal issues around moderating comments or message boards – but I’ll come back to that another time…