Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Sing Along with the CDC

Social marketing expert Nedra Weinreich points out the questionable mirth of the Centers for Disease Control's Yuletide offering to the World Wide Web that appears as "The 12 Ways to Health Holiday Song." Although not available as a ringtone, you can download this song about public health dos and don'ts to your MP3 player or send it as an e-card to your loved ones.

My favorite part of their portion of epidemiological online Christmas cheer had to be this legal disclaimer at the bottom of the website, which is sadly one of the rare definitive assertions of "fair use" seen on federal government web pages.

*Disclaimer: Under the Copyright Act (17 USC Section 107), the use of the tune The Twelve Days of Christmas on this website is permitted under the "fair use" exemption for the purposes of nonprofit education and public health information dissemination. For any other purpose, this work may have copyright protection under 17 USC Sections 106-120.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Nedra Weinreich said...

It's a case of good intentions coupled with a not-very-compelling execution - sadly, very typical of many social marketing efforts.

The disclaimer is an example of what I'm learning first-hand right now about just how hard it is to loosen the Federal fist from mandating control over the CDC's online and social media efforts. Government is not set up to allow "conversations." Hopefully this will evolve sooner rather than later.

1:37 PM  

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