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Brand Equity in the Age of UGC: Hey Dude, Don’t Be a Dick
In the SXSW 2009 session “How to Protect Your Brand Without Being a Jerk,” panelists cautioned brands to police trademark violation while still protecting PR by practicing flexibility and communication when it comes to new media law.
In the age of user-generated content, sharing, remixing, mashing-up, and even simply referring to copyrighted content has landed both brands and users in a world of hurt.
What panelists called a “folk understanding” of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and traditional media law have given rise to large-corporate paranoia in the gray areas of new media content publication. Misunderstandings of Internet culture as well as trademark infringement have lead to heavy-handed policing of content and trademark use, often leading to online PR debacles.
“You become known as the brand that sues,” said panelist Oren Bitan of HIQI Media.
This is an interesting discussion. I know that, in my own work, I am sometimes afraid to use logos in blog posts or even icons to indicate media type because of copyright and trademark issues.
For instance, placing an MS Word icon next to a link to an MS Word document could, potentially, get you sued by Microsoft. They own the rights to that icon, and there are no real protections (as far as I’m aware) for reusing it in that context.
Technically, even including a logo or a screen shot of a product in one of your blog posts could be considered trademark infringement. It’s an interesting predicament with no right or wrong answer at this point in time.
Although we’d like to think that no one’s going to get sued for something like that, the possibility does still exist.