New Rules on Compensated 'Endorsements"

[elin]

Hi,

Some of you may have seen that yesterday the US Federal Trade
Commission issued new rules for online "endorsements" in large measure
to deal with some of the deceptive practices used in "viral marketing"
to promote products. Specifically, anyone who posts a review or
recommendation of a product or service and who has received any kind
of compensation (including complementary products) from the company
involved must disclose this.

This has basically been our practice anyway, since we don't allow self-
promotion or paid promotion on the forums and the JED will suspend a
developer if the editors discover that compensation is being given for
reviews or votes. We also have discussed this in the past in terms of
book reviews on the community site. People who have gotten free books
are required to disclose this already.

So, I think we are not in bad shape, but we probably want to check/
update our terms of service to reflect the general principles.
Although it is the responsibility of individuals to disclose their
compensation, I think we should just reiterate this in our TOS and
rules. If we want to prohibit compensated postings then we should do
so explicitly, just as we do with self promotion in the forums.

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf
(warning, 81 pages )

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/business/media/06adco.html?hp


This is a good opportunity to look at our various TOS and rules so
that the information we provide users is as useful to them as
possible. .


Elin

Elin Waring
President
Open Source Matters
Part of the Joomla! Project
Providing a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration
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