 |
| This is what bullshit looks like |
Some of them sound legal. There’s one the cites the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) and the Rome Statute, both of which sound really serious. The only problem is, as lawyers are happy to point out,
the UCC is a model code and is not law. Where the UCC has been adopted, it only applies to commercial transactions, not intellectual property.[1]The stuff you’ve posted on Facebook: pictures, comments, and such are all intellectual property. Some of it might even be yours. That meme you copied? Not your intellectual property. There is a piece of text that floats around the Internet which inaccurately implies that stuff found on the Internet is public domain, while the stuff the person who posted the notice also posted is most definitely not public domain. Posting something on the Internet doesn’t alter its copyright status.
The Rome Statute part is even more interesting.[2] It’s the international statute (to which the United States is not signatory) which sets up the International Criminal Court. I really wanted the ICC to be the court that dealt with dashing jewel thieves who smuggle diamonds from Paris to New York while impeccably dressed. No such luck. The ICC is the court that deals with war crimes, genocide, and things like that. No matter how badly you think of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, you probably don’t think them guilty of genocide.
 |
| If your lawyer really told you do to this, find a better lawyer. |
Why is these things so attractive to people, given that they have no actual legal standing and that there are some associations that at best seem to be conspiracy theorists? I have a thought on that.
I am not a lawyer (IANAL) but I do have some training in Medieval Studies (IAAM).[3] I have seen legal mumbo-jumbo before. These posts aren’t intended to be legal. They’re incantations.
The Internet has become a scary place, in part due to Facebook.[4] The online world probably would be scary without hoaxes, fake news, reports of Russian manipulation, fake accounts, and so on. Then there are the moral panics, where someone is happy to report that social media will degrade your intellect and made you a worse person (typically without any data to support such a thesis), which fall in nicely with previous moral panics such as novels[5] or reading newspapers.[6]
What can you do about it? How do you deal with the terrors of the Internet.
You can recite an incantation. Because if these don’t have legal force, but they have emotional force (and why else would people share them?) they’re in the category of the superstitions people do to ward off harm (which is exactly what they hope these posts will do). Are they effective at warding off harm? Probably as effective as throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder. Also saying “bless you” after someone sneezes has no clinical efficacy in preventing colds. Or warding off evil. But you do it, don’t you?
These social media posts, with their meaningless language, are our contemporary version of some medieval charm. They sound good, although they have no actual power to ward off malign influences. If you’re bitten by a snake, you need modern medical attention, not the poultice of herbs in the Nine Herbs Charm (which tells you to recite the charm three times over each ingredient, and then in four places on the victim).
Medieval charms were chanted repeatedly, just like a social media post that gets shared again and again. Like a medieval charm, they don’t actually become more powerful by repetition. They never had any power at all.
The next time you see that a friend has posted something that tells you to copy it to your own timeline in order to ward off some dreadful aspect of social media (Facebook billing you, or showing you only twenty-six friends[7], or taking possession of your photos[8]), cross your fingers, knock on wood, close your umbrella before you go inside, but don’t copy that post. Please. Even if someone said that someone else’s lawyer said that you should.[9]
- Protecting Your Legal Rights on Facebook, retrieved 5 February 2019. If that’s not enough, here’s a post by a lawyer whose work is on copyright, trademark, publicity right, and media law.
↩ - Well, at least to me.
↩ - I Am A Medievalist.
↩ - Yeah, thanks a lot, Facebook.
↩ - The novel was guaranteed to be injurious to the mind, particularly the minds of young women. Clearly your high school English teacher did not have your best interests at heart, but we are talking about someone whose brain had been disturbed by years of reading novels.
↩ - The death of conversation.
↩ - We don’t know the specifics of the Facebook algorithm, but we know it rates posts as to how sticky you’ll find them. If you interact with a lot of memes and wonder why you never see the posts where friends tell what going on in their lives, it’s because Facebook can tell that you like and share memes and scroll past your friends. It’s watching you, which kinda does make you want to ward off evil.
↩ - A violation of copyright, though if Facebook tried to monetize your work (instead of just you), you’d probably have a hard time getting damages. ↩
- I mean, free legal advice from a lawyer who didn’t put their name to it? ↩
You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.
This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!
No comments:
Post a Comment