Dom's quite excited about the view from Wiggin's office

I’m at Wiggin LLP‘s offices with my client, Tempero, for their jointly hosted ‘User Generated Content Forum’. The event discusses the legal and practical implications of allowing UGC on your web property.

Wiggin are media law experts and opening the session, then Tempero [Founder Dominic Sparkes] will take over and tell attendees how community moderation can help brands protect their image and meet their legal obligations.

Some good brand names here: M&S, Grazia, Hiscox to name a few.

First up is Wiggin [I didn't catch the name of the speaker, apologies!]

How do you manage liability?

• It all starts with the platform: what do you want to achieve? how is the User bound to your T&Cs?
• You can’t hide behind small print, you have an obligation to make sure your users actually *read* the T&Cs [cripes, no more dodgy online competitions or surveys my PR friends]
• Explain clearly what is and isn’t acceptable, outline the consequence of a breach, and ensure your audience sees and consents to those terms
• Ensure you retain the right to monitor and moderate [Dominic is smiling. What a great room to be in when you run a moderation company!]

Dominic is now up. He starts by asking who’s thinking about starting a community – no show of hands… Luckily a few people here already run communities, phew.

What is moderation?

I love how Dom explains moderation is *more* than edit/delete; managing community, set editorial tone of voice, protect users, support issues and, if nothing else, monitoring and responding to 3rd party notifications.

What types are there?

• Pre
• Post
• Reactive

Dom now moves on to his ‘Pearls of Wisdom‘ stuff [a proven crowd pleaser]

1. How do you make your users bother?
2. What’s your duty of care and how do you get a community to accept you?
3. By creating a social space you are creating a customer service channel (so, do you really want loads of users griping there? How will you manage it?) [this is my personal fave]

Question time:

Are you supposed to feel the moderator is ‘behind the scenes’?

Dom: It all depends on the community. Some sites don’t want to hear from the brand and some demand it

Can you rely and trust automated tools to help with moderation?

Dom: there’s some brilliant tools out there, however when it comes to liability you’ll always need a human moderation element

Where’s it gonna go long term? Pre or post moderation?

Dom: Personally thinks post is better for the user experience, but it’s a question of risk for brands

What’s the time difference between pre and post moderation?

Dom: Depends on the investment, could be seconds if you have enough moderation resource on it. Some clients only want moderation once or twice a week

Wiggin: As quickly as practically possible is ideal. Legally, the police give a 2 day window for removal of potential terrorist activity you didn’t know about, but you couldn’t use that as a definitive guide [Not sure I heard/understood this correctly. Apologies if I've got it wrong, it's important stuff]

Dom: technology can help. Get consultancy sooner rather than later when starting a community site to make sure you pick the best platform solution

If you put too many barriers to sites won’t people just stop contributing?

Dom: Absolutely, you’ve got to pick the right terms for the right community based on potential risk

How do you assess & manage risk and come up with an insurance policy which then works for customers? [Hiscox]

General discussion about limited liability and how much risk is acceptable

General consensus is there’s no one answer; it’s different for all

What about the issue of disclosing user data? How far should you go to protect the information that your community provides to you?

Wiggin: You don’t volunteer the material, after all there’s the Data Protection Act, but of course you should provide when someone applies to the court and it’s ordered. If you’re actively opposed to revealing the names you are, effectively, allying yourself with the ‘wrong doer’ and potentially taking on liability

How common is it for websites to be taken to court due to liability of what others have said/done/posted online?

Wiggin: It’s happening increasingly

Wiggin: Particularly when an individual has been libellous and obviously aren’t financially able to recompensate, the web company may be the obvious choice to go to next

Who’s libel for P2P content sharing?

Another Wiggin lawyer in the audience: Basically everybody [Lots of conversation; Wiggin declares their interest as representatives for some music companies in this space. I generally fight urge to stand up and say "I object". All very exciting]

This lot are great. The Q&A session ends on “let’s just take the rest of this chat to an informal drink”. [Wiggin have their own label beer. Genius]

–

[My own personal disclaimer: None of the content here can be relied on as perfectly recounted or constitute formal legal advice. The writer acknowledges this is simply my interpretation of conversation at the event] – is that the way to do it Wggin?