Attorney Glenn Manishin (@glennm) tells amusing lawyer jokes at the 140 Characters Conference this past week in Los Angeles. Scroll down and hit play.

Glenn was on the panel that discussed public policy, legal issues within the context of social media and who owns what on the web.

Says Glenn, “if you ask a lawyer a question, they’ll say, it depends.” Well, in this space, it really does depend because there is no law about social media right now. There are doctrines of law that affect social media, you can be fired, not hired, but he asserts, that in many ways, “its still the wild wild west.”

Because the wild wild west is abbreviated to www….now what? What about linking? Caching? Twitter? Answers are evolving as we speak. Risks are high but if you don’t take the risks, you also don’t yield the rewards.

So, who owns the content on social media networks? Can employers prohibit employees from using social media?

Employers could learn a lot about their employees by not only allowing them to voice an opinion but engaging with them in the process. If you let employees use social media, you can monitor their voice and their behavior. Instruct them out to use it and give them concise guidelines but give up the control. In the long term, that control won’t work to serve corporations.

Larger corporations don’t just think about the legal risk but also the business risk. Brett Trout (@bretttrout) talked to us about intellectual property law. He says with a grin, “social media isn’t like baby bottles or the phone – it’s a tool you have to use. If your lawyer isn’t using social media, you need to get a new lawyer. You need a lawyer who understands what it is and its implications.”

As for endorsements and being up front about what you’re doing, we are given this analogy: sharks don’t know much about playing badminton but they do know how to hunt & kill.

On copyright and trademark issues, 90% of tweets are repetition of facts that are already public and out there.

Tweets live forever and anyone can see them. There’s a difference between that model and Facebook, a walled community, which means you decide who sees your content.

Normally the copyright rule is that if you use the entire article or quote, it’s not considered fair use. You can use a portion of something for commentary or parady. If you retweet, by definition, you’re basically repeating everything someone said.

By posting something on Twitter, you are not copying it, you’re reposting someone’s stuff and as Pete Cashmore once said about reposting stuff, it’s great to extend that reach of what you said. Hear hear. Distribution distribution distribution.

@glennm below tells us some amusing lawyer jokes on-site at the Kodak Theater last week.

At this month’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, client Answers.com’s Bob Rosenschein talks about the latest growth and why its such a popular answers destination site with KRON-TV’s Brian Shields.

At the 140 Character Conference last week in LA, I talked to Kodak’s Chief Blogger Jennifer Cisney. She talks to us about her role at Kodak.

I had a chance to spend some time with the MashCast team at the 140 Conference this past week in LA. They refer to their video mashup as collaborative expression, a new category of communicating that allows for advanced levels of creative and collaborative interaction using video.

They can essentially drop photos into existing video templates or create new ones, updating statements or images daily depending on the situation.

Within a MashCast network, individual artists and businesses can own and manage exclusive online communities, giving them the power to connect their network to all social media outlets (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) for one-button-push, net-wide distribution of select content; grant varying levels of rights, roles and permissions to members; distribute content securely to their subscribers real-time or “on demand”; customize and segment content for targeted communications to different kinds of users. The result? The ability to “own the audience” while opening up new revenue streams for their brand.

A proprietary rich internet application allows subscribers and network operators to pass creative content—video, audio, animation—back and forth to each other over the MashCast network in real time.

Take a look at two personalized videos they did inserting my photo into a video – and this is just one small piece of what they’re capable of. You can also click play below.