Web marketing and social media management are rather nebulous, at least when it comes to the sphere of law. Most of the rules that govern the internet were written before the internet even existed; therefore, there is no direct connection between them. For example, rules about the privileges that a newspaper has because of the First Amendment are perfectly clear. However, what would consider a blog to be? Does it act as a newspaper, or is it private speech? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer as the courts have yet to have any meaningful decision in regards to the internet and the legal issues thereof.
For example, there is a way to embed another site onto your webpage through the utilization of something that we in web marketing call an iframe. That seems all well and good. However, does this violate copyright? After all, you are copying other people’s work. Even if you were to mark it as coming from somebody else’s website, you’re still utilizing it without permission. So, it clearly seems to be violating copyright, correct?
But Google does essentially the same thing when it compiles it lists of search results; it takes information from other people’s webpage and, even though it marks it as not being generated by Google, does so without permission. So, if the iframe example is in violation of copyright, why isn’t Google getting sued twenty trillion times a day for violating the copyright for literally millions of persons (there are those who think that folk have to “opt in” to the search results; this is not true. Even if you never request Google to do so it will still crawl your webpage and include it in their results)?
So, what about social media? Although SOPA (and, its sister bill, PIPA) is dead, there is no reason to think it could never appear again. In fact, the US has signed onto ACTA, an international treaty which, conceivably does the same thing that SOPA was trying to do. The ramifications to social media management of these bills are massive. Simply put, social media, as user generated content, relies on persons being able to post things. How can Facebook possibly police EVERYTHING on their website to check if something is violating somebody else’s copyright? They don’t have the ability. How can a huge business screen all comments to popular posts to see if there is a similar violation? Once again, they can’t.
Therefore, I, as somebody who has a job in web marketing, asks that the courts take up cases relating to the internet in order to establish clear guidelines. Simply put, there is no way for it to continue as medium under such great legal obscurity. While I personally think that the courts should be clear when it comes to policing social media, at least if we have a law in place we will know what we have the ability to do.
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