Legal Internet Marketing Blog

Members and readers of social networking sites are adept at sniffing out deliberate attempts to manipulate their thinking, especially when the merits of a product are being reviewed. Members who shill for a particular product or company—particularly members who are posting for the first time—are quickly called out and these social media communities are very good about self-enforcing membership protocols. Starting on December 1, 2009, they are going to get some help from the Federal Trade Commission. Bloggers, twitterers, forum members and others who write product reviews will be required to disclose payment or the fact that they received free merchandise for the items they review.

The new guidelines are an extension of the FTC’s 1980 guide regarding the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The new regulations have drawn mixed reviews from bloggers and other social media writers. Some say it will add credibility to what they do, identify them as serious writers and establish professional standards. This is especially relevant in the fashion blogging community where some bloggers referred to derisively as “cloggers” use their sites or forums as a means of soliciting free samples or gaining invitations to exclusive fashion industry events.

“Cloggers will tweet about how they’d just love a free garment or accessory directly to a brand’s Twitter account,” one supporter of the new rules said. “They brazenly insist on tons of samples even though they haven’t been blogging long enough to build up any sort of readership.”

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An article published recently in the Los Angeles Times reports that Yahoo, parent company of venerable website hosting giant GeoCities, is closing down the site that allowed people to create their own pages a decade ago. Then GeoCities sites created by users ranked well in search results and were a social networking hub of sorts for hundreds of thousands of users. Though rudimentary and generally unsophisticated, these pages allowed users to create fan sites, talk about their hobbies, share their political views and a myriad of other topics. They could create pages at no cost, take advantage of a modest amount of storage for images and documents and stake out their own little corner of the Internet when there weren’t many options to do so.

Yahoo was scheduled to pull the plug on the domain and millions of pages on October 25, 2009, and one of the most common domains in the young history of the Internet was expected to cease to exist except in fond memory. In early 2009, although GeoCities stopped accepting applications, current users were allowed to update their pages and save their sites to their hard drives. Compared to peak traffic and users in the late 90s, comparatively few users remained. Yahoo is urging those remaining to transfer their accounts and pages to Yahoo’s web hosting service for $5 a month.

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A group representing Chinese authors has accused Google and their digital library of violating copyrights. Google disputes the claims saying that their online library service is in full compliance with international laws. Google has reportedly digitized at least 10 million books and many publishers and authors have filed lawsuits against the search giant for digitizing their works and copyright infringement. The China Written Works Copyright Society claims that Google scanned thousands of books written by Chinese authors without getting their permission and without providing compensation.

Chen Qirong, spokesperson for the CWWCS, said, "Whether you are a small company or big company you still need to respect the copyright of the authors."

Google said that it had received permission to digitize more than 30,000 books from over 50 Chinese publishers to provide this content in search results and in previews.

"We believe the book search complies with international copyright law," said Google representative Courtney Hohne.

Google’s ambitious plans to create a huge digital library has been praised by some and condemned by others here in the U.S. and abroad for copyright, antitrust and infringement of privacy. The alleged copyright violations are the latest in a series of controversies—real and imagined—that have made headlines in China for Google. The negative publicity has made it hard for the company to gain market share in the country where numbers of its users are well behind Chinese search giant Baidu.

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A company introducing a new computer mouse is usually no big deal. A new shape, specific application, color, material or innovation seldom attracts much attention unless the company making the mouse happens to be Apple. Apple recently introduced a new type of computer mouse without any buttons to click for a retail price of $69. Instead of using physical buttons to send commands, the new input device is itself the button, according to Apple.

Using wildly popular touch technology which has made the iPhone and iPod Touch huge hits around the world, the top of Apple’s Magic Mouse is a sensor that can detect and execute common mouse commends such as scroll, pan, swipe and click on website links, business software, and a wide range of different applications. While earlier versions of Apple’s mice were criticized for their uncomfortable and sloppy feel and loose fit that wasn’t ergonomic at all, Apple’s Magic Mouse is Bluetooth-enabled for wireless convenience. The company says it is designed to be comfortable to use for both right- and left-handed users.

Windows users interested in buying and using the new mouse will be disappointed. The Magic Mouse will only work on Macs running the Leopard operating system versions 10.5.8 or newer. The company announced recently that the new mouse will ship with a new range of desktop iMacs. During the same conference, Apple also said that a new, bottom-of-the-line MacBook will be introduced soon that will retail for $999.

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