July 2017

Businesses shelling out big bucks for prime advertising space are used to paying close attention to content, for the sake of the bottom line as well as out of respect for consumer law. However, it may not feel as natural and cost-effective to apply the same scrutiny to an Instagram caption. Why invest the business resources when teenagers worldwide can master the art?

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has recently issued new social media guidelines for businesses which emphasise the answer repeatedly: as far as the regulator is concerned, businesses have the same responsibilities on social media as they do in all other marketing channels. Consumer protection laws (including, for example, the prohibition on conduct that is misleading or deceptive, or is likely to mislead or deceive), apply to Snapchat stories and ads in national broadsheets alike.

The age of the Internet poses many new challenges to those individuals seeking to protect and enforce their intellectual property rights online. As the Federal Court of Appeal in Canada recently stated: “Under the cloak of anonymity on the internet, some can illegally copy, download, and distribute the intellectual property of others, such as movies, songs and writings.”  (Voltage Pictures, LLC et al. v. John Doe #1 et al., 2017 FCA 97 at para. 1 [Voltage Pictures].)  As a result, Canada has slowly began modernizing its copyright regime in order to allow the cloak of anonymity to be lifted and the identity of alleged infringers to be revealed.  (See e.g., Copyright Modernization Act, S.C. 2012, c. 20, s. 47.)

June of 2017 ended with the German parliament approving the bill targeted at eliminating hate speech and fake news on social media, including on Facebook, YouTube, and Google. The law will take effect in October of 2017, and could carry fines up to EUR 50 million.

We previously discussed the bill on this blog post.  Now that the bill has been passed into law, social media companies are required to remove illegal hate speech within 24 hours after receiving notification or a complaint, and to block other offensive content within seven days.  The law also requires social media companies to report the number of complaints they have received, and how they have dealt with them, every six months.

On June 19, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a North Carolina law prohibiting registered sex offenders from accessing social media sites was unconstitutional.  This post will review the case and discuss a few takeaways for companies.