Navigating the Rights and Risks in Social Reading

Abstract

Digital “social reading” platforms provide a wide variety of new means to discover, comment on, and build communities around published works. With this innovation, however, comes new forms of legal risk that publishers may not anticipate. New means of creating text—in the form of reviews, highlights, and other user-generated content—provides not only new opportunities for users to infringe copyrights, but also for publishers to infringe copyright interests in the user-generated content. Moreover, the right of publicity—which governs the commercial exploitation of an individual’s identity—will be increasingly implicated as individual users of digital platforms gain notoriety and authors’ personas are misused. Most of these risks can be mitigated by adopting proper terms of use, but too many publishers either ignore this step until it is too late, or else fail to review and update existing documents to reflect new technological and legal developments.