Election imprints in the online world: what should the rules say?
Last week the BBC picked up on a blog post of mine about the failure of the Government to use existing legal powers to draw up rules for election imprints in the online world. The Government’s response was, essentially, that it’s not possible to come up with rules for such a fast-moving area.
I think that’s wrong – websites and email have been around for more than a decade, and whilst new services do comes along (most notably Twitter since the last general election) a set of rules which was updated once a Parliament would be able to cope.
Really the only way to settle that disagreement is to demonstrate an example of what the rules would say. Tom Watson MP has also commented: “Thinking about this a bit more and in brief twitter conversation with Mark, it strikes me that the best approach should be to get the political parties to sign up to a set of guiding principles.”
So here is my first stab at an outline of what such rules would look like. Comments, suggestions, draft wording to fill in the details in the outline etc. all most welcome. I’ve deliberately not tried to word a full set of rules at this point – so as to concentrate on the broader picture – but there is a sea of expertise out there, so by all means dive in and start suggesting how parts should be written up.
Overall principles
- The logic for having imprints on printed literature – making clear who it is from, informing people who is legally responsible for the contents etc. – applies as well to online material as offline.
- Online imprints should be easy to access and should not be so burdensome as to make it impossible or impractical to use a particular technology. If that is the case, the imprint information should instead be readily and clearly available from elsewhere.
- The information should be readily available, e.g. not requiring someone to watch a 10 minute film to find it.
Information that should be provided in online imprints
- The same trio of information should appear as for printed material – the electronic equivalent of the printer, the promoter and who they have promoted it on behalf of.
- The “printer” for web services is the firm who provides the service, e.g. Facebook or YouTube. For distribution services, such as email, the “printer” is the firm whose technology does the distribution, e.g. the firm running the SMTP server used.
Audiovisual material
- In order for the imprint information to be readily available to people, it should be available at the start of any such material or immediately adjacent to the material (such as on the packaging of a box that a DVD comes in).
- Where audiovisual material can be republished or embedded elsewhere, only having the imprint adjacent to the audiovisual material in its original location is not sufficient.
Material with length limits
- If, and only if, a technology imposes a length limit on content which means that a full imprint would take up more than 15% of a message, the imprint need not be included with the message.
- Where the message automatically contains a link back to a profile or user page, such as tweets, then the full imprint information should be provide on that profile or user page.
- Where there are no such links, such as with text messages, either it must be possible to reply to the message, or the message must contain contact details, and either way any reply requesting the imprint information should be responded to within 48 hours.
So, over to you…
[...] in coming up with a draft set of principles for digital electoral imprints. You can find the draft proposals over at the Wardman Wire. I’m going to mention this to the General Secretary of the Labour Party next time I see him. [...]
I never understood the ‘printer’ section of the imprint… what does it achieve? And if its basically nothing, why bother copying it into the online world?
In printed material, i can just about see that knowing the company which printed it has some meaning to the average voter as everyone is familiar with the concept of printing… but if you add in details of who hosted what sever and which software was used to generate the emails or host the video etc… then who is gonna know what on earth that all means?
And if the answer is pretty much no one, why bother?
Looking at it, this seems a very sensible starting point. I have responded in a blog post (mainly so that I could use some mark-up…) here http://www.techideas.co.uk/?p=302. If wanted I can repost it here as a block of text, or feel free to duplicate or use any of it as you see fit so that it makes a little more sense in the context of this post….
Essentially I agree with much of it, although I do see a couple of issues pertaining to email and I would add a few recommendations as to how imprints may be included. I also take some issue with the concept of “printers” in an online world…
Thanks.
.-= ajehals´s last blog ..A reply to Mark Pack on election imprint rules. =-.
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Richard: the reason for “printer” (or the online equivalent) is two-fold. (a) To varying degrees the “printer” has some legal liability for what is said or done, and therefore you should be able to get hold of them, and (b) even short of legal action, contacting them is sometimes the most effective route, e.g. if you are receiving multiple spam copies of an email, contacting the sender is usually the best first option, but if you can’t get hold of them, the firm whose email servers are being used is a good second port of call.
ajehalls: (Sorry for not responding on your blog, but couldn’t get it to let me.): in addition to the point above, for something like embedded video there is still an original source. E.g. if I embed a YouTube film on another site it is still coming from YouTube.
I like the idea of a wiki. I like even more the idea of someone else having the time to set it up
ajehalls: (Sorry for not responding on your blog, but couldn’t get it to let me.): in addition to the point above, for something like embedded video there is still an original source. E.g. if I embed a YouTube film on another site it is still coming from YouTube.
The thing is that the Youtube video may not originally have been placed on Youtube but come from Vimeo or any other site, often video can be downloaded and redistributed (it often is), of course Youtube will add a watermark on upload, even though they have no real responsibility toward the content…
This applies to rather a lot of data, indeed it is that redistribution, multimedia, mashupability of this kind of data that I see as the issues with online content of this type. After all if it is just static content then there really is no difference between it and printed material or TV/Radio broadcasts.
As to responsibility there is something of an issue when it comes to assigning it, a company who happens to host an SMTP server shouldn’t be responsible for the content, Google cannot be responsible for everything on Blogger, MS is hardly responsible for everything on livejournal etc.. As such I would argue that the most important elements are the source/author and the person it was created for. The medium is too liquid to be appropriate in most cases.
As to: I like the idea of a wiki. I like even more the idea of someone else having the time to set it up
Right, I’ll get onto that then.
.-= ajehals´s last blog ..A reply to Mark Pack on election imprint rules. =-.
OK, I have put together a Wiki (rather generally) and started a page for these guidelines here: http://crossparty.ictprojects.co.uk/index.php?title=Election_Imprinting. I will put together the site and the rest of the wiki structure and alter permissions etc.. around it. As such be aware that things (as in design, layout etc..) may change, although the content will obviously remain the same. The whole thing will move to wiki.crossparty.co.uk as soon as the DNS for that site propagates.
I will drop my discussion points into the discussion page when I get round to it today and make some edits to your initial ‘first stab’ as soon as I have the site in a stable and sane way and find some time to do so.
You do need an account to edit (And currently setting up accounts and anonymous access is disabled) so if you want an account I can email you the details (using the address listed on your blog?).
That whole site is a bit of a fluid concept (initially envisaged to be a place for policy discussion across ideological lines) so this seems a fairly decent initial test case for its use, it will obviously expand and I would welcome any input you had on the wider subject.
.-= ajehals´s last blog ..A reply to Mark Pack on election imprint rules. =-.
[...] attempt at crowd-sourcing drafting an example set of rules – I’ve done a post over on Wardman Wire on the topic. Do take a look – and throw in your suggestions [...]