About

Welcome to Becker & Poliakoff’s new Social Media Law and Practice Blog!

The Blog
This blog is meant to provide updates and analysis on a wide variety of legal issues to the extent those issues relate to social media platforms.  The pervasiveness of social media in our lives is undeniable.  Its impact has repercussions for us as individuals and for society as a whole.  It reveals who we are and who we choose to associate with.  It provides an extraordinary medium for communication and provides us with access to others in an unprecedented way.  Perhaps no characteristic of social media is more representative of it than its immediacy.  It combines the speed of technology with the speed of our own thoughts and observations.  While we might have always been warned to “think before we speak,” we now need to also “think before we write, post, upload, share and Like.”  The law is meant provide order to our society and provide a certain degree of predictability to how we live our lives.  This blog is fundamentally about the interaction between the order and predictability that law is meant to provide with the immediacy and unpredictability that social media platforms sometimes foster.  As with most areas of law, we seek balance and reasonableness, but at times find both to be somewhat elusive.  The areas of law implicated via social media include, constitutional, privacy, employment, contract, regulatory, international, intellectual property and many, many others.  This blog hopes to touch on all of those areas and provide for a civil and meaningful discussion on this critically important part of our lives and how it shapes the way we interact with others.

Defining Our Terms
For our purposes, “social media” relates to any means of communication via a network that involves user generated content or at least an interactive, or potentially interactive, experience rather than merely a passive one.  This could include, but is not necessarily limited to, blogs, sharing sites, online communities, news sites, networking sites, mobile apps, e-commerce sites and many other such sites and applications that are limited only, as they say, by our own imaginations and the genius of those folks able to execute on a vision and muster the technological expertise to make it happen.

“Social media law” does not, at least for now, refer to a particular practice area but instead refers to the interaction between social media platforms and recognized areas of legal practice.  Impermissibly copying and distributing someone else’s poem implicates Copyright Law. Impermissibly copying and distributing someone else’s poem on Facebook, potentially violating its terms and conditions, triggers issues related to Contract Law and Copyright Law and it is the interaction of those practice areas with the technology of social media that we can review and analyze under the umbrella of social media law.  

Thank you for your interest in our blog.