Law Week

Hi Everyone!

What comes to our digital business course, this haven't been the most active week for my part. I spent nearly a week at my childhood home in Central Ostrobothnia, and therefore couldn't participate on Monday's lecture about law. That's pretty sad because I see that legal affairs are kind of important things to know when it comes to business or any marketing.

Anyway on Monday our team Di6iBrainiacs started to work with three exercises about law. In the first part our task was to make a short review of what should be taken in consideration, if you want to establish a shop online. We studied about cancellation right in distance sales and notice of cancellation, confirmation of order in distance selling and information to be provided prior to the conclusion of a contract.

In the next exercise we were asked to visit a website of an online shop and find out what kind of a description of a person file and form of a cancellation right they have on their page. Our team chose Verkkokauppa.com's webpage, and our common opinion was that the pages were really easy to read and understand. They weren't trying to mislead customers, but provided very clearly all the required information that law demands.

Our third exercise was to prepare a presentation about recognisability of advertising in blogs. The legal regulations and praxis in case of blogs are very similar to any other sort of marketing. Below I have listed the most important aspects from Consumer Protection Art that an enterprise and a blogger need to consider when marketing in a blog:

• Marketing shall clearly indicate its commercial purpose and the party on whose behalf the marketing is carried out. 

• A trader who seeks to advertise a product through either a professional or amateur blog is obligated to obey all legal regulations in his or her activities.In practice this means that a company has met its obligations with respect to the recognisability of the advertising when it has instructed a blogger to act in such a way that no hidden advertising is practiced. 

• A company that sends products to bloggers, hoping that positive reviews might be written about them, should instruct the blogger to act in such a way that cooperation or receiving gratuitous benefits should be disclosed openly in connection with the posting.

• Advertising must be recognisable as advertising at first glance without closer examination. Vague expressions, such as "some of the products have been received via the blog", or "product x dropped through my mailbox" shouldn't be used because the reader can't know on the basis of that information if it involves advertising or not.

• When writing about a product, a reference to the company that markets it must be made each time that the product is mentioned, or if it's otherwise significantly connected to the post. Having mentioned it in a previous post is not sufficient.

Pinpuff.com's blogger Anja Logožar have also listed in her blog post three key legal issues online marketers need to know about. Very briefly they are:

1. Data collection and privacy. Make sure your customers know that you will be collecting data from them. Prompt them to comply to your data collection policy, and once you collect the data, keep it safe on a reputable storage provider. Also, make sure to protect yourself from liability in case of data loss or a security breach.
2. Intellectual property. Make sure to protect your services and products and have trademarks and copyright, but do not infringe the intellectual property of others. The most common way many marketers infringe on intellectual property is by using images that are protected. In order to avoid this use stock photos or free images
3. Advertising. The regulations you should follow are: do not use any misleading marketing messages,do not use deceptive advertising. speak truthfully about the product and do not leave out relevant information about the product, abide by the advertising standards: you should compare products fairly and transparently.

Alright, this was all about my law week's thoughts. Next week I'm gonna pop to the e-commerce fair in Helsinki and I really hope that after all the inspiring lectures and meetings there I have learnt a lot and have some fresh thoughts to share with you too! 😊