“Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University are co‐hosting a conference on September 25, 2010 entitled “Media Law in the Digital Age: The Rules Have Changed, Have You?” in Atlanta, Georgia.”
Read more at the Citizen’s Media Law Project
The schedule for the conference is here:
http://www.omln.org/conference/atlanta2010
Conference website is here:
From CitMediaLaw.org:
“The Federal Trade Commission has announced that it has completed its first investigation under the “blog-ola” rules it adopted last year, which require bloggers and other social media posters who receive a free or discounted product or service to disclose the freebie in their reviews or commentary about the product or service, or face the possibility of an FTC enforcement action. See “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising,” 16 CFR Part 255 (2010) (html) (pdf).
In the end, the FTC decided not to take any action against Ann Taylor (decision letter), whose Loft division (formerly Ann Taylor Loft) offered gifts to bloggers who attended a January 26 “exclusive blogger preview” of the chain’s summer 2010 line.”
Click here to read more at CitMediaLaw.org
So much for those who thought the FTC was primarily interested in going after the floggers. Besides, it’s a lot easier to find Ann Taylor.
Related:
Note: Troy Dooly has stated on his blog that he has an upcoming post about Data Network Affiliates. I read through the current posts about DNA and it was not 100% clear to me what his current thinking is about it.
However, that is actually secondary to the point of this post as you will see…
Troy Dooly’s MLMHelpDesk is one of the places I routinely send people to when they have questions about MLM (Network Marketing). I will continue to do so. The other places I tend to send people are MLMWatchDog {Rod Cook), EagleResearchAssociates (Lynndel Edgington), MarketWaveInc, the banned programs list at BlogQuik, and Patrick Pretty’s blog.
In other words, I don’t consider myself to be qualified to give an opinion on MLM opportunities. I turn to the experts like Troy Dooly and the others that I’ve mentioned for their opinion.
However, one thing does puzzle me about when Troy Dooly at one point moved Data Network Affiliates out of Scam Alerts are these two statements that he makes:
“From the very beginning we have voiced huge concerns over the use of an MLM compensation structure by DNA or any other company, when paying their “distributors” to collect license plates; this concern has not changed, however Data Network Affiliates has made some major strives to show the direct selling industry their goal is to create a viable long term MLM business opportunity for the average distributor, as well as the full-time MLM professional.”
Along with the earlier statement he made this post about Data Network Affiliates on March 13, 2010 in which he stated:
“Although, I have asked some hard questions over the last week, I will also be the first one to yell from the tree tops, if Data brings out a viable business for distributors, which will not bring the regulators calling.”
A lot more discussion has gone on about DNA in this April 27 discussion at MLMHelpDesk since these two statements, but still don’t understand this sequence of statements conceptually.
If Troy believed that the original business model of DNA would “bring the regulators calling”, but the latter business model wouldn’t how can that qualify a company to come out of scam alert status?
I asked my good friend Lynndel Edgington who runs EagleResearchAssociates.org this hypothetical question about a hypethetical company:
“Can a company in the MLM industry start out as a scam and then later go legit and have no impunity?”
After he gave the answer to the question I realized how dumb my question actually was. Here’s what he said:
“That would be like saying a bank robber isn’t liable for previous crimes because they no longer robs banks.”
Related: