August 2017

The South African Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPI), which protects the processing of personal information by public and private bodies, is much like similar UK and EU legislation. It was signed into law in November 2013 but is not in full effect yet. Once the Act is made effective, companies will be given a year’s grace to comply with the Act, unless this period is extended as allowed by the Act.

On July 14, 2017, a federal trial court ruled on an interesting issue: could models and actresses, whose popularity on social media was a strong factor in determining their earning capacities, maintain a lawsuit under the Lanham Act against a “swingers club” that used their photos without consent?  In a case where social media played a prominent evidentiary role, the court permitted the models’ claim to proceed, and denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss.  (Lancaster v. The Bottle Club, LLC, Civ. No. 8:19-cv-634-T-33JSS (M.D. Fla. July 14, 2017) (2017 WL 3008434).

Have you considered what you would like to happen to your social media accounts when you die? Where the platform gives you options, have you selected one? A while ago we wrote about what happens to your social media account when you die.

Many platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn have different policies about what will happen to a deceased person’s profile. Since our last post, some of these policies have changed. Here is the current status as of the date of this post:

Emoticons – the often whimsical hieroglyphics that most so affectionately know as “emojis” – have become ubiquitous in modern digital communication not only by individuals but also by corporations as part of their advertising and marketing campaigns on social media. Emojis have also begun appearing as evidence in court cases.

A short, but fascinating, discussion between several experts in the fields of computer science, hieroglyphics, and social media of the impact emojis have had on our language can be found here. The crux of the discussion is that emojis can have a profound impact on the way we communicate. Essentially, the inclusion of a single emoji can alter the meaning of the accompanying text. Alexandre Loktonov, AHRC Fellow at the Kluge Center and an expert on hieroglyphics, likens emojis to what are known as “deteriminatives” in Egyptian hieroglyphics, or “signs, which, without having a phonetic value of their own, can ‘color’ the meaning of the preceding word or phrase.” In recent years, the nature of emojis has been addressed in several lawsuits, proving that courts may be recognizing the importance these characters have begun to have with respect to our language and communication.

In June, we introduced the topic of chatbots and highlighted some key risks and concerns associated with this growing area of technology.  One business in particular, DoNotPay, made headlines recently by announcing that it would begin building legal chatbots for free.

The claim? In a July 14, 2017, posting to the online publishing platform Medium, Joshua Browder, founder of UK-based DoNotPay, writes, “Starting today, any lawyer, activist, student or charity can create a bot with no technical knowledge in minutes.  It is completely free.”  Sound too good to be true?  To be sure, DoNotPay is not the first company to develop law-related chatbots—these bots are already popping up all over the world.  But because this technology is still fairly new, chatbots that are attempting to automate services previously performed by licensed attorneys will almost certainly attract scrutiny. 

At this point you are probably familiar with the world of social media influencers. You might follow several on Instagram, or maybe your company partners with them to promote its products. But have you realized that the most valuable influencers may not even be human? This post will focus on animal influencers – they are cute, they come in a variety of species, and they are being paid to advertise products via social media.

Why animals?

Aspiring animal influencers can rise from obscurity to fame in an instant – all it takes is one viral post. The demand for cute and funny animal content is certainly present. As the Brand Protection Blog has previously reported, an estimated fifteen percent of all web traffic is connected to cats.