OPEN

Keep an eye on how these legal stories pan out – regulators are beginning to grapple with social media and it could get ugly. The EU are considering that any video blog that carries advertising could be subject to the same regulation that applies to TV.

This from today’s Times:

POPULAR video blogs will be subject to new European regulations if
Brussels’s proposals to update television regulation are adopted by
Europe’s member states.

The threat — confirmed by European officials yesterday — has
prompted Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, to say that the
Commission plans are misguided.

 

The
Commission said that “blogs could be caught” by the new rules if they
“had a commercial purpose, where video was the main element”. A blog
also has to be popular enough to count as “mass media”.

That could encompass any successful video blog that takes
advertising. Many bloggers try to earn extra money by hosting adverts,
supplied by Google or another internet broker, and the number of sites
caught by the proposed rules is likely to be substantial. [read the whole article here…]

See also previous Open post: The lawyers are coming…