Legal rights and responsibilities

In this week's digital citizenship blog post, Susan Halfpenny and Stephanie Jesper share too much information...

For those of us who, through some social awkwardness or other, struggled with the challenges and responsibilities we encountered in our everyday lives, the online world came as a blessing: it was a benign anarchy; a sandpit with no sense of consequences. Images were shared without caring about who made them in the first place, and memes were established as a consequence. Likewise with music and video, when the bandwidth had increased sufficiently to permit it. Cyberspace was a place where property laws did not apply: an information commons in the public domain.

But this was a fantasy. Rights owners soon learnt what was going on and were keen to regain control of their properties online. The 2000s saw a steady shift as businesses caught onto the opportunities of the internet. Spotify and iTunes found efficient and legitimate ways to replace music-sharing services like Napster and its successors, and the likes of Netflix and Amazon Video are doing similar things with video. But respecting rights of ownership can still be a challenge, especially if rights-holders don’t engage with the accepted online channels.

The deaths of David Bowie and Prince in 2016 highlight the complexities of online rights very effectively: following Bowie’s death, social media was awash with shared videos, images, music and film. Sharing is how social media intrinsically works, and also how society tends to work more generally. People shared their grief through artifacts for which they were not the rights holders, or linked to YouTube videos put up by fans with little or no regard to whatever individual or company actually owned the copyright.

When Prince died, a few months later, there was notably less of this going on. Prince had taken a firm stand regarding his music copyright, with takedowns issued on YouTube, and his albums pulled from streaming services. His argument was that artists could not earn a living from streaming royalties, and it’s an argument that for the most part holds true, certainly for smaller acts. It could be countered that the internet serves as a form of free advertising, and that online sharing can translate into sales, though this is far from evident in the record industry.

It’s clear then that the challenges and responsibilities we face in the online world are great and morally complex. On the one hand we want to celebrate our heroes and share in our enjoyment of their works. On the other hand, we also want to see artists recompensed, or at the very least, stay on the right side of the law. It’s a conflict we all have to negotiate in our online behaviour; and it’s one of many. The conversational nature of social media has seen numerous people charged with libel and other offenses. In some cases this has initiated changes in the law to adapt to the new circumstances of the digital age; in many cases it has firmly established a continuity of the law within the digital realm. Even a deleted post can leave a trace — there is no ten second rule in terms of social media.

What laws do we need to be aware of?

Social media and online interaction allows us all to be journalists, researchers, and, effectively, online publishers. We’re publishing our thoughts and opinions to a global audience. Are we therefore subject to the same laws of privacy, defamation, copyright, marketing, official secrets, (the list goes on), as traditional publishers?

The short answer to this is yes.

We need to think about what we are sharing, and ask ourselves whether it is in line with the legislation that governs creative outputs, the use of other people’s data, human rights and other legal rights. But unlike many large publishing firms, we haven’t all got our own legal team, nor are we likely to have a fighting fund to pay any legal fees that may come our way, should we do something that turns out to be questionable in the eyes of the law.

And it’s made more complicated still by the fact that we are publishing our thoughts globally. It would be impossible to go into detail of all the laws across more than 200 jurisdictions that we potentially need to consider when we are publishing online.

Don’t let these legal complexities put you off going online, though. We’re subject to just as many in the offline world. If we behave in a socially responsible way, we should be able to avoid any unwanted interest from the law.

There's more about the legality and ethics of online engagement on our Information security Skills Guide and our Practical Guide to Copyright.