{"id":1053,"date":"2012-11-15T12:54:59","date_gmt":"2012-11-15T12:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/?p=1053"},"modified":"2012-11-16T10:02:18","modified_gmt":"2012-11-16T10:02:18","slug":"pr-people-in-the-eu-obey-the-bright-line-rule-or-suffer-legal-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2012\/11\/15\/pr-people-in-the-eu-obey-the-bright-line-rule-or-suffer-legal-consequences\/","title":{"rendered":"PR people in the EU: obey the bright-line rule, or suffer legal consequences."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d heard of the German ruling, but hadn&#8217;t realised it meant that editing with a commercial COI, violating the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/User:Jimbo_Wales\/Paid_Advocacy_FAQ\">bright-line rule<\/a>, could be a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost\/2012-11-12\/News_and_notes\">legal hazard in the EU<\/a>, violating the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unfair_Commercial_Practices_Directive\">Unfair Commercial Practices Directive<\/a>. In Germany your competitors may be able to sue you for it, and in Britain you could be prosecuted. That&#8217;s <i>as well as<\/i> the media hanging you and your client out to dry.<\/p>\n<p>(The Signpost article claims with no justification that the ruling &#8220;complicates&#8221; the issue of COI editing, rather than making it much simpler, <i>i.e.<\/i> damn well listen to us and <i>don&#8217;t do it<\/i>. Some PR people may not <i>like<\/i> it, but that&#8217;s rather a different thing.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d heard of the German ruling, but hadn&#8217;t realised it meant that editing with a commercial COI, violating the bright-line rule, could be a legal hazard in the EU, violating the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. In Germany your competitors may be able to sue you for it, and in Britain you could be prosecuted. That&#8217;s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2012\/11\/15\/pr-people-in-the-eu-obey-the-bright-line-rule-or-suffer-legal-consequences\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;PR people in the EU: obey the bright-line rule, or suffer legal consequences.&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wiki"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4FmVR-gZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1053"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1068,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions\/1068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}