Book Review: Legal Issues of Web 2.0 and Social Media

Steve Kuncewicz’s names crops up a lot (in a good way) in social media, especially if you are connected to the Manchester business scene.

He is a solicitor in the Intellectual Property & Media team at Halliwells LLP inManchester, handling mainly contentious matters for local, national and multinational businesses.

For the record, at the time of writing this review I have not met Steve, or done business with him, although we have been following each on Twitter for a short while.

This is a very thorough book in the areas it deals with (I’ll explain that comment later) and is long overdue for anyone advising on social media strategy, be they  working in communications agencies or in-house.  I’m sure I am not alone in having been presented with questions on the legal implications of social media and have spent many hours sifting through Google search results to find authoritative, concise answers on which to base confident decisions.

For those reasons alone I welcome and recommend this book.

This is not a cheap book (£295) and I suspect that many will be put off by the cover price, but I can say with some certainty that if you value your time or your company’s time at even modest commercial rates, you will get your money’s worth and probably avoid some expensive bear traps.

I imagine that similar sentiments will be true of the legal sector at whom this book is targeted. From speaking to other lawyers, there seems a strong appetite for clarity in this area.

What strikes me reading  the book is the difficulty (which Steve acknowledges in his introduction) of dealing with an area of law which is moving at such speed (for example the section on the Digital Economy Act is essentially impossible to nail down because the threat of repeal is real and even as I write this blog, this possibility has changed with the news that BT and TalkTalk are to mount a legal challenge to it). The other striking and parallel thought is how static or reliable the law has proved to be in many areas – a number of the authorities, for example in obscenity are decades old.

Dealing with the content, I enjoyed reading this book; it is written in a flowing, accessible, journalistic style and as a non-lawyer it provides a depth of fact and reference that will meet the needs of any in-house or agency practitioner. If after reading this you still need a lawyer to advise you, I suspect that spending even a little time with this book will make those conversations substantially more productive and informed. For that alone, it is worth the cover price.

As you would expect of what is in many ways an ambitious and pioneering work, it is not without flaws, the main one being a flaw of omission. I was surprised not to see discussions of the challenges posed by social media to employment and general commercial law, for example on the degree to which a company’s social media policy can a) protect the business from litigation arising from the reckless act of the individual posting something on social media and b) the extent to which imposing a draconian internal policy may be an infringement of the individual’s right to expression and even the idea, now established in other European countries, that access to the internet is a human right.

As an IP specialist, employment law may not be Steve’s personal speciality but this is such a significant issue for organisations that they would be foolish to ignore it and, I would argue, puts many organisations off social media and in doing so leads them to overlook commercial advantage and possibly towards pushing employment issues under the carpet.

The second point is that the nature of the chapters varies in ‘factual density’. For example the chapter on privacy reads more as a magazine article written at an abstract level than an exploration of the statutes, especially when contrasted with the chapter which follows on data protection that seems to be written with much more conviction and is laden with both examples of cases and long sections of the relevant law.

It may be that the legal issues around privacy are less certain, but equally this uncertainty is likely to be more fertile ground for legal challenge.

I hope that the success of this first edition will lead to refinements and expansions of these areas in later editions.

The final observation is a general one and not a criticism of the book; that many of the examples of organisations pioneering the use of social media for commercial purposes are US based, such as Dell and Zappos. For anyone familiar with social media they are very well known. This is a reflection that the UK cases of commercial success and failure are still some little way off – but will provide more than enough content for an expended edition two, three and so on.

I hope and believe that this book can be a substantial contribution to UK organisations in better understanding the opportunities and challenges and that subsequent editions will be peppered with our own success stories.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Legal-Issues-Web-Social-Media/dp/1906355959/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279129147&sr=8-14