October B2B Article on Immunity, Blogs and Social Network Is Here!

The B2B has published the next in my series of artlices with co-writer David Bowman.  This October article is called  ”Blogs, comments subject to libel law:  Sites walk fine line between editing, being immune from suits.”    It discusses some choices you might want to make about how you set up your site and what you choose to edit and how that might affect whether you have immunity for what others say on your blog.    Happy reading!  (Next artcle will be on privacy aspects of social networking….)

Social Networking Helps Cut Company Legal Fee Costs – How? Read on!

Social networking is helping companies (specificially corporate counsel) cut legal fees by providing groups and forums for them to discuss and share ideas and answers to legal questions for free.  For instance, on Linked In, there are topic groups that you can subscribe to, like Intellectual Property.  You can then post questions and answer other people’s questions.  Human resources professionals are also benefiting.  Of course, there are issues about the lack of attorney-client privilege and there is no privacy to the questions.  However, for general inquiries that are not private (perhaps such as “Where might I find good examples of social networking policies?”), these sites can really help.

Corporate counsel are also trading forms and drfating their own documents before sending them to outside counsel.

To read more about how companies are cutting costs, see this article here, which incidentally, mentions LexisNexis, my employer.

Facebook and Privacy

Are you concerned about your privacy on social networking sites?  Take a look at EPIC’s site on just this topic here.   You’ll learn a number of things.  For instance, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner investigated Facebook’s privacy practices, issued some findings, and Facebook listened and issued a press release about some changes it will make here.  Specifically, in that August 27, 2009 press release, Facebook says these will include:

“• Updating the Privacy Policy to better describe a number of practices, including the reasons for the collection of date of birth, account memorialization for deceased users, the distinction between account deactivation and deletion, and how its advertising programs work.

• Encouraging users to review their privacy settings to make sure the defaults and selections reflect the user’s preferences.

• Increasing the understanding and control a user has over the information accessed by third-party applications. Specifically, Facebook will introduce a new permissions model that will require applications to specify the categories of information they wish to access and obtain express consent from the user before any data is shared. In addition, the user will also have to specifically approve any access to their friends’ information, which would still be subject to the friend’s privacy and application settings.”

Go to the Settings tab, pick Privacy Settings, and pick what you want to be shared!

Facebook posts disparaging your co-workers can get you fired

Yes, Virginia, Facebook postes disparaging your co-workers can get you fired. Just see story of Griffin Scott, who posted on his Facebook status that the rest of the news team didn’t know what the Enola Gay was. He described the incident like this:

“The comment was posted on my personal Facebook page on August 14. I made the comment that I ‘knew what the Enola Gay was and that makes me the only person under 40 who knew that in our newsroom. Not sure whether to be proud or not,’” he said.  

See the Denver- The Latest Word blog here.

Apparently, three days before he was fired, he was asked to remove the post, which he did by deactivating his account.  They fired him anyway.  Now he has filed suit for breach of contract.  The station had terminated him under  a contract clause that prohibited him from subjecting the station to public disrepute, contempt, scandal or ridicule. For more on that see here.

Articles by yours truely re: SOCIAL MEDIA and the LAW

The Dayton B2B recently published an article of mine on Social Media policies, whether employers should have them, what they might look like, etc.  To read it, click here.

The Dayton B2B also recently began publishing a series that David Bowman and I are doing on social media.  David writes on one side about the business implications, and I write on the other side about the legal implications.  Each month there will be a new article.  Our first article is here.

Please let me know what you think of the articles and what ideas you want to see covered in future articles.

Ping.fm

Update all your social networks at once with ping.fm.

Inside Facebook – a site that tracks Facebook’s changing statistics

Inside Facebook is a site that tracks Facebook’s changing statistics.   “[The majority of US Facebook users are now over 25. There are now 6 million users 13-17, 19.5 million 18-25, 13.4 million 26-34, 9.7 million 35-44, 4.6 million 45-54, and 2.8 million over 55. In other words, there are more Facebook users 26-44 than 18-25 today.”

Wow.  The older generation is seeing the benefit of SNS for communication.