UPDATE: Facebook changed their promotion guidelines on May 11, 2011. This post reflects information regarding promotion guidelines prior to that date. I have provided an update to Facebook promotion guidelines. Technically, Facebook promotions and giveaways are not a legal issue. However it has come up quite a bit so I figured it's an important topic. [...]
Used to be that we would upload our photos to our computers and then email them out to friends and family. Then the photo files got to be larger and larger and it become annoying to send one photo at a time. Photo sharing sites were developed to help facilitate showing our friends and family [...]
Monetization, ad-sponsored content and conference sponsorship discussions have become more and more prevalent among the blogging community. I’ve noticed that the issue of contractual obligations has started to come up. Throughout the twitter stream I see pleas for sponsorships, giveaway donation, reviews and so forth. In addition, as bloggers, often we agree to a number [...]
Today I came across a series of tweets about a food blogger who was upset that another blogger took her photo and recipe, reproduced it on her site while providing a credit and link back in smaller text but also tagged the original blogger on Facebook. Earlier in the week, Confessions of a Cookbook Queen [...]
On December 1, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) updated their rules regarding advertising disclosures. It was the first time that the rules specifically brought bloggers under the FTC rules and guidelines. And the blogging world, since then, has been trying to figure out what to do. The FTC provisions are set out in 16 [...]
If you’ve been blogging for any time, you’ve probably come across people who have talked about incorporating yourself/your blog. Blogging as a business is not a new phenomenon. Making money from blogging, however, is becoming a reality for more and more people. As such, you may want to consider becoming a business. Why, you [...]
If I were to ask a room of online entrepreneurs if anyone has had their work copied without permission, I'm confident every hand in the room would go up. When I was in law school learning about copyright and intellectual property, I had a very heavy laptop computer. Copying music meant making a mixed [...]
Recipe Copyright Explained in Plain English One of the most asked questions I get has to do with recipe copyright. It's very upsetting for food bloggers to see their work copied verbatim. Unfortunately, unlike photos or images, all words don't carry the same weight when it comes to copyright. Recipes are one of those [...]
If Imitation is the highest form of flattery, please don't flatter me!. When I first started writing on to this information superhighway in about 1993, back when it was indeed called the World Wide Web, there was so little content no one really worried about what other people did. In the 17 years I’ve [...]