Previously when internet first made its mark into the lives of people, it was free of any laws and jurisdiction, however with the increased number of users globally, widened market for companies and raised ethical issues, the government’s jurisdiction has been widened to include the internet under the control of the government. An example is the broadening of the Federal Trade Commission’s rules to all the bloggers that are present within the United States. You must know that over the years, the largest amount of legal changes and increases that have been made to a particular sector on the internet is that of blogging. Bloggers are being forced by the United State’s government to follow several legal duties and adhere to them if they want to escape from legal action being taken against them. This article will discuss these adherence rules in detail one by one.
When Going for Paid Blogging
Over the years blogs have been used as a source of marketing as large companies hire bloggers to use a technique known as “word of mouth” to promote their product over the internet. It became hard for customers to distinguish between whether the information is particularly valid and owned by the company or if that information is real or not. Due to this, the Federal Trade Commission created a legal duty under which the bloggers were to disclose to the public that their particular piece of writing is paid for and belongs to which particular company. Hence, one must declare the end source when opting for “word of mouth” marketing technique.
Hence if you are a blogger you must be careful to state the source if you are being paid by the company. What you should do either mention at the end or the beginning of our blog that this blog is a paid advertisement by this particular company. Remember to do so if you want to escape from any legal action.
Blog to Website Linking
If you are a regular blog reader or a blogger you must be aware of the concept of linking. Those who are new to the field should know that the concept of deep linking has gained massive popularity over the years. It is a phenomenon through which the blogger provides links within the text when talking about a particular thing that would lead readers to a web page that explains that particular thing or provides more information to the readers. This way the blogger can provide better content on his or her blog. However, this raises issues at that link doesn’t necessarily provide access to the main web page of a site, but might provide direct access to pages within or some small portion of a web site. What does this do to the privacy and copyright infringement laws?
To provide better privacy protection to websites and stop any type of plagiarism by these bloggers the Federal Trade Commission has passed a rule to properly provide citations and references for any links and information by these blogs. Furthermore you must also provide a clear statement saying that this particular website is not a part of this blog and the link has been provided only to provide readers with more valuable information and research purposes only otherwise these blogs would be considered as plagiarized and if lie in the jurisdiction of the United States government, can be sued.
