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Went Hot: November 7, 2007 - 1:42 pm
Posted By: evilgreenmonkey 306 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.theregister.co.uk)
Category: Blogging
From the beginning of next year, it will be illegal for people/websites based in any of the European Union member states to publish testimonials, comments, endorsements or blog posts which self-promote or impersonate without disclosure. Personally I can't think of a single blog that has a biased opinion or is used for self-promotional or commercial gains...
A French MEP is quoted as saying: "This is one war that we're happy to back".
Viva la revolution!
7 Comments
Comments
Jeese that's crazy. What the hell is biased blogging, and how on earth are they going to Police this? That's just crazy. Blogging is used for marketing purposes all over the place, are they going to shut them all down. Bring it on EU, I'll like to see them try.....
this is just enforcing disclosure from what I can see.
I can see why they doing this but as Lisa says, no idea how they will police this. I can't see the thousands of osCommerce owners etc. choosing not to 'help' their product review sections.
Besides that if they do crack down on it, you could very easily place a lot of suspicious testimonials on a competitor's site and report them.
The Eurocrats strike again.
While I can appeciate what they want to achieve, I don't think they have any way of making it work.
Way to go, Nick... you hit the nail on the head. It's like when people used to ask, "Can't Google ban your site if you use comment spam, en masse, to link to it?" and the answer, of course, would be, "Sure, and then a person can just fire up the spam machine and point to all of his competitor's sites."
The best case scenario for what they are trying to do is to just put the fear of g-d into some people in an attempt to control some of it. Just like what happened when some poor little granny got fined and arrested for downloading from Napster. ;-) It won't stop BS blogging but it will make a fe examples of people and put a dent in some of it.
When they do stuff like that, they scare off the copycats who will try anything new until the first of their kind gets the axe.
Gonna be interesting, though!
Sam
I am sphinning this not only because it's interesting...but because this headline is freakin hilarious!
This is excellent for business. It will be absolutely impossible to enforce, but only the people that are smart enough to know that most of those testimonials are fake anyway will know that, while everyone else will think that all the testimonials are legit, since it's illegal to fake them.