Does Your Company Employ A Charlie Sheen?

Does your company employ a Charlie Sheen? A Charlie Sheen employee is one of your company's best rainmakers who generates huge profits along with huge amounts of publicity for your company via traditional means or social media. Some of the media may be positive but other press may be negative.

A Charlie Sheen may be considered a wild card (#winning, #Tigerblood) in that he may act in a manner that nobody may envision. Some of his actions may be self-destructive while others may be just bizarre. However much trouble a Charlie Sheen may cause, he adds huge revenues to your bottom line and creates much needed buzz for your company. Therefore, finding a way to get along with your company's Charlie Sheen to continue the win-win economic relationship may be in the best interests of all parties involved.

The real Charlie Sheen is an American Actor who has been in the public eye for more than 30 years. He is the son of famed actor Martin Sheen and his brother is Emilo Estevez. Some of Charlie Sheen's work includes major roles in the movies Platoon and Wall Street, and in the television sitcom Spin City. However, during his life, Charlie Sheen has had many ups and downs reportedly due to substance abuse. Since 2003, Charlie Sheen has been the main star of CBS' highly rated situation comedy Two and A Half Men. The sitcom has been ranked in the top 20 for each of its 7 seasons and it has been in syndication since 2007. The producer of Two and a Half Men is Chuck Lorre.

In the Social Media Age, differences between employees and their employers can easily go viral. In the Charlie Sheen vs. Chuck Lorre heavyweight fight some Hollywood insiders believe that Lorre exacerbated the situation by stating negative personal opinions about Sheen on vanity cards that are placed at the end of a television episode. In addition to putting his personal opinions on the vanity cards, Lorre also created a website: www.chucklorre.com that contains all of his vanity cards.

Last week, Two and a Half Men was canceled for the rest of this television season allegedly because of Sheen's rants against Lorre and CBS/Warner Bros. Over the past few days, Sheen has stated he may sue CBS/Warner Bros. for hundreds of millions of dollars. Sheen has hired one of Hollywood's top lawyers and appears willing to move forward with legal action. A letter on Radaronline.com may even be the actual correspondence that Sheen's lawyer sent to CBS/Warner Bros.

The bottom line is that employers should not create a hostile work environment for their employees. The generally accepted definition of a hostile work environment may soon include the creation of social media posts that denigrate employees. On March 1, 2011, Sheen created a Twitter account www.twitter.com/charliesheen and within 24 hours attracted more than a million followers. Therefore, regardless of whether you agree with Sheen's behavior, he still commands a huge audience and has great entertainment appeal. In addition, Sheen appears ready, willing, and able to return to work. Unless Sheen's employment contract contains a well-defined morals clause and Sheen has breached it or another contract clause, Sheen may be entitled to the rest of the money owed to him under his contract.

Social Media has changed conventional wisdom in business and law and every company must be aware of the legal issues inherent with social media usage. It is too early to tell if CBS/Warner Bros./Lorre will apologize to Sheen while licking his feet but it would not surprise me if we get at least one more season of Two and A Half Men with Charlie Sheen. As they say, "there's no business like show business."

To learn more about the legal, business, and entertainment ramifications of social media usage you may contact me at www.shearlaw.com.

Copyright 2011 by the Law Office of Bradley S. Shear, LLC. All rights reserved.

Corporate Counsel's IP Trademark, Copyright & Licensing Cousel Forum

On September 14th and September 15, ALM's Corporate Counsel will be hosting a seminar that will discuss current intellectual property issues. The conference's keynote speaker will be Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights. Intellectual Property practitioners from all over the country will be speaking and will be in attendance.

Some of the topics that will be discussed at the conference include: Protecting Your IP in a Digital Environment, Monetizing Your Copyright and Trademarks, Recent Online Litigation Developments, Structuring Licensing Programs, and IP Issues in Social Media Marketing.

Some of the organizations that will be represented at the event include: The New York Times, the Recording Industry Association of America, The Author's Guild, Gannett Co., the U.S. Copyright Office, News Corporation, Comcast Entertainment Group, Conde Nast, ESPN, ABC, and NBC Universal.

The Conference will be held at The Harvard Club of New York. For more information click here.

[Full Disclosure: Shear on Social Media Law is part of ALM's Law.com Blog Network]

Viacom vs. YouTube May Be a Victory For Copyright Owners

The Viacom Int'l Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., 07 Civ. 2103 (LLS) (S.D.N.Y. June 23, 2010) summary judgement in favor of YouTube was hailed as a victory for technology companies and a loss for copyright owners in most major publications. In my opinion, the instant analysis of the case and its effect on future litigation misses a key important point. This point is the amount of time that Internet Service Providers (ISPs)/Online Service Providers (OSPs) have to remove infringing content once they have received a Digital Milenium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notice.

There is a saying among lawyers that goes something like, "when the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. If both the law and the facts are against you, attack the other side." In this case, the law was clearly against Viacom. The DMCA's safe harbor is as wide as the Pacific Ocean. 17 U.S.C. Section 512 (c) provides ISPs/OSPs broad protection against claims of copyright infringement by rights holders whose work appears on the ISP's/OSP's websites. In addition, the facts of Viacom's case appeared to favor YouTube. According to the facts of the case, Viacom spent several months accumulating over 100,000 videos that were illegally uploaded to YouTube and then sent one massive take down notice on February 2, 2007 to YouTube. By the next business day, YouTube had removed virtually all of the illegally uploaded videos.

The bottom line is that the take down provisions in the DMCA worked. Several months after the lawsuit was initially filed in 2007, YouTube launched a service called Video Identification Tool which assists copyright holders in protecting their content from being illegally uploaded onto YouTube. It appears that YouTube was extremely responsive in this matter.

If YouTube did not act as quickly as it did to remove the infringing content then I believe Viacom's position would have been greatly strengthened and a different outcome may have occurred. Therefore, I don't think this was the best test case for copyright holders.

In my analysis of the DMCA, ISPs/OSPs have only a small window of time to remove infringing material once they have received a DMCA take down notice. The next time an ISP/OSP is sued for enabling copyright infringement it will need to prove that it took no more than a few business days to remove the alleged infringing material after it has been notified. If it takes more than several days for the alleged infringing material to be removed I believe that the copyright holder will have a stronger case than Viacom that the ISP/OSP should not be protected under the DMCA's safe harbor provisions. Since it took YouTube only one business day after it received a DMCA take down notice to remove the infringing content, the bar is set extremely high for other ISPs/OSPs. The take down notice was also sent more than 3 years ago and since then technology should make it even easier for ISPs/OSPs to remove infringing material once they have been notified. Therefore, I believe the length of time it takes an ISP/OSP to respond to a DMCA take down notice may be a central issue in future litigation.

To learn how to protect and monetize your intellectual property you may contact me at http://www.shearlaw.com/.

Copyright 2010 by the Law Office of Bradley S. Shear, LLC. All rights reserved.

Disney's Facebook Application For Toy Story 3 Is Inherently Dangerous

Disney's new Facebook application made a splash in the New York Times yesterday. The New York Times article states, "[t]he application, called Disney Tickets Together, could transform how Hollywood sells movie tickets by combining purchases with the powerful forces of social networking." The Disney Tickets Together application will alert your Facebook friends and invite them to also buy tickets to the same Disney event.

Oliver Luckett, SVP and GM of DigiSynd, a Disney subsidiary is quoted in the article as saying “[t]he whole idea is that no friend gets left behind.” This mentality is extremely troubling because it demonstrates Disney's utter lack of concern for the personal privacy of its customers who purchase tickets via Facebook. Creating a Facebook application that focuses on Toy Story 3's target audience, children, is especially upsetting. This application will allow child predators to know who will be attending an event and where they will be. It is an application that child molesters can easily utilize to target their prey.

Applications that utilize a Facebook user's information is a lazy method of social media engagement. Instead, Disney should immediately terminate this application and focus its Facebook strategy on engaging and conversing with its more than 3.5 million Facebook "likes." A review of Disney's Facebook page demonstrates that Disney's current strategy involves posting a link and then letting its fans comment on the post. Where is the social media interaction and engagement?

Facebook needs to ban application developers from being able to access your personal information as a prerequisite to utilizing an application. There is no reason why an application that asks, "What old school WWF wrestler are you?" needs to know your personal data and your friends information. For the record, I was labeled Hulk Hogan. All the information the application needs is included in the questions the application asks you to answer.

Facebook and Disney need to share the blame for this new application because Facebook's recent privacy controls do not go far enough in protecting a user's personal information. The new privacy controls should enable a user to have full control over his or her Facebook profile. Unfortunately, the new privacy controls do not fully enable a user to pick and choose what information is shared. Facebook's failure to properly protect its users' personal information demonstrates why the Social Media Privacy Protection Act is needed.

I grew up loving Disney movies, their theme parks, and the entire Disney experience. Walt Disney was a visionary in experiential marketing. However, this Facebook application that Walt Disney's successors have created has crossed the line. Disney's new application is an inherently dangerous one because it provides child molesters with information they may utilize to harm our families. I would highly advise other entertainment companies not to follow in Disney's footsteps because there is no legitimate reason for a movie studio to create an application that utilizes its Facebook's customers' data.

I challenge Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Disney's CEO Robert A. Iger, and any other Fortune 500 CEO to provide a rational reason why access to my personal Facebook data or my friends' data is required for Disney's Tickets Together application or any other Facebook application. To resolve this issue you may contact me directly at 301-652-3600 or at bshear@shearlaw.com.

Copyright 2010 by the Law Office of Bradley S. Shear, LLC. All rights reserved.

Social Media Sports Marketing and Branding

Traditional sports marketing and brand management is in transition. For years, the professional sports leagues have relied on radio and print newspapers to provide them free marketing. The leagues provided journalists open access to their games and in return sports writers would report on the games, the players, and the teams to their audience. This basic model worked for many years. When television became popular in the 1950's, the model was tweaked and the television networks started to pay handsomely for sports content. In the 1970's, Ted Turner once again tweaked the model via cable television.

Over the past several years, we have watched the beginning of the end of print media, a changing radio landscape and a transformation from watching television via cable to the Internet. This media transformation has changed the sports marketing and branding paradigm. Consumers have become extremely sophisticated and are tuning out traditional advertising. People do not want to be sold to. They want to engage in a conversation with a brand. Passion is the name of the game and the best medium to harness this passion is social media. Social media is not just the Internet. Social media is about interacting with a brand and feeling connected to it.

The top consumer cult brand is Apple. The unquestioned American sports cult brand is the NFL. Each of these organizations have spent years connecting with their followers. The NFL's cult brand has been forged by the "Greatest Game Ever Played," "The Ice Bowl," and players like the Baltimore Colts' Johnny Unitas and the Cleveland Browns' Jim Brown. Games and players come and go. However, the experiences that fans have with these events and the players is what keeps fans excited and interested in the NFL.

Social media is all about passion. When a Facebook user is excited or upset he posts to his Facebook wall. In response, the Facebook user's friends may engage in a conversation about the post. An excellent example of this interaction occurred on the Facebook page "Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!" Even though Betty White has been in the entertainment business for more than 60 years, she may end up being best remembered for how she became the host of an episode of Saturday Night Live.

Several months ago, a Betty White fan created a Facebook page requesting that Betty White host Saturday Night Live. The Facebook page's popularity grew to a point where Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live could not ignore it so he invited Betty White to host the show. NBC knew or should have known that the Betty White episode would have a built in audience that would enable them to sell the advertising for the episode at a premium. Betty White was hilarious on the show and it was a ratings success.

Brands need to learn how to engage with their customers. If companies understand how to properly utilize social media they will be able to better predict the success of their marketing campaigns. In addition, they will be able to fully leverage the value of their brands to others who want to be connected to them.

Unfortunately, too many companies think the answer to engaging social media users is to focus their strategy on posting on their Facebook wall, or tweeting about new product lines and sales, and building applications that capture a customer's private information. Congress is in the process of drafting new online privacy regulations that may limit or change how personal information is collected and utilized. Therefore, the current preferred method of obtaining a customer or a potential customer's data via an application when a customer visits a Facebook wall or clicks on a link may soon be obsolete.

In the Social Media Age, there is no substitute for interactive customer engagement. Building a cult following is achievable if your company is ready, willing, and able to create and follow a detailed strategy. To learn how to design and implement a successful social media sports marketing and branding campaign that will abide by the soon to be enacted Social Media Privacy Protection Act you may contact me at http://www.shearlaw.com/.

Copyright 2010 by the Law Office of Bradley S. Shear, LLC. All rights reserved.

Entertainment Social Media Branding Contracts

Branding products and services and how the law protects your brand is extremely important in the social media age. Recording artists, writers, and film makers are utilizing social media to create their brand and to include other brands in their work to attract the attention of corporate sponsors.

Recently, a New York Times article discussed how some entertainment contracts include specific branding clauses and that some talent feel pressured to include certain brands in their work to attract sponsors. Television product placement is not new. During most live television programs the announcers usually state throughout the program that the show or event is sponsored by xyz company. One of the most famous movie product placements was Reese's Pieces in the movie E.T. in 1982. When I watched the movie as a child I had no idea that this was a product placement. However, as an adult I would expect that most adults who watch the movie know or should know that including Reese's Pieces prominently in the movie was a big advertising coup for Hershey.

Under the recently revised FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising "material connections" between advertisers and endorsers must be disclosed. However, I am wondering when is this threshold actually met? For example, if an artist includes a brand in his work in the hopes that the brand will end up sponsoring his work, and then the brand eventually sponsors the artist's work does this connection need to be disclosed since the original work was not created with a "material connection" between the artist and the brand? If an artist posts his original work on Youtube or another social media website before there is a "material connection" but later a corporate sponsor is attracted to the project does the artist now need to disclose this sponsorship?

These are some of the many legal issues that the social media age has created. Constantly changing technology will only make these issues more difficult to analyze. To learn more about these issues you may contact me at http://www.shearlaw.com/.

Copyright 2010 by the Law Office of Bradley S. Shear, LLC. All rights reserved.