The rules of a viral campaign??

[Heretic]

I was thinking about how the Blair Witch managed to make many, many (gullible) people think that the movie was actual footage of people who are now missing.

So, the though arose of how far can a movie studio take something like that before getting in trouble? What if they had leaked footage to new sites as "evidence" of missing college students and potentially had it carried as news? Obviously, a little fact checking by the news organizations would keep that to a minimum, but in the internet age, a snippet of that movie could explode into a national "real" phenomenom and lead to a search for the missing people.

Any ideas on what the boundaries are, legally or morally?

[djchristensen]

Originally Posted by Heretic

I was thinking about how the Blair Witch managed to make many, many (gullible) people think that the movie was actual footage of people who are now missing.

So, the though arose of how far can a movie studio take something like that before getting in trouble? What if they had leaked footage to new sites as "evidence" of missing college students and potentially had it carried as news? Obviously, a little fact checking by the news organizations would keep that to a minimum, but in the internet age, a snippet of that movie could explode into a national "real" phenomenom and lead to a search for the missing people.

Any ideas on what the boundaries are, legally or morally?

I totally think of the original broadcast of the War of the Worlds, in the late 80's early 90's they did a 4 hour fake news cast on CBS about a meteor etc. They had placed scrolling disclaimers every 15 minutes just so people woudln't panick.