I was at Panera’s waiting for a colleague, taking advantage of the black bean soup and free wireless, when I came upon this story about a Blogger jailed in Anna Nicole Smith defamation suit. I’m not going to discuss this case, I don’t care about it except as an example of why vengeance, stupidity, and cyberspace should not walk hand in hand, but what is interesting to observe is the increase in lawsuits filed against bloggers in the United States.
Up to a couple of hundred thousand blogs are started every day, so suing bloggers, especially if they own homes and have large bank accounts, big gossipy mouths, and not an ounce of common sense, could be quite lucrative. You can goggle Internet Defamation and see it’s a growing niche, the blogger version of ambulance chasers. There are also internet sites selling bloggers insurance, capitalizing on the fear of being sued niche. Media Bloggers is one to those. Thanks to our advancing technology we have a whole new niche, ripe for exploitation, and it involves lawyers and insurance. Go figure. If common sense would only prevail we’d have none of this, but somewhere along the line someone decided that freedom of speech meant something other that what it really means, and others have spent years making money from the confusion. It’s only going to get worse.
When people start yammering all over the internet they might want to delay reading about how to blog, how to get readers, how to get comments, how to get links and fame, and how make money. Instead, after reading a few simple books on basic writing, go directly to What is defamation, yes Virginia you can in some cases be sued for your opinion.
One thing I did find at Media Bloggers was a link to this mini course, Online Media Law, a joint project of “Media Bloggers Association; Citizen Media Law Project, which is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Citizen Media; City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and Baruch College; and Media/Professional Insurance”, at News University. You have to sign up for News University, but it only takes two seconds, and after doing so you can enroll in the course at the bottom of the page. You can read through the course quickly. You can also take an assessment quiz before or after reading through it.
The assessment is common sense, if you don’t do well it would benefit you to read the course. I got 1 wrong. Erring on the side of caution, I presumed someone could be sued for calling someone a jerk. Hypothesizing the “what if the name caller had a PhD in jerks”, not the honorable degree in jerks that most of us think we have, but a real one, yeah lets just assume for a minute that there is such a thing. What if the Doctor of Jerks had a personal website, but his about page states his credentials and links to his authoritative research on jerks. Say he calls his neighbor a jerk, or calls someone a jerk in the comments of another blog. Is he more liable because of his expertise, even if he was just ranting in a non professional way on his or someone else’s personal blog?
Gets kind of murky there for me….
Some links:
Top Ten Rules For Limiting Legal Risks
Citizens Media Law Project
Center for Citizens Media
Teaching Copyright
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Wonderland or Not: The Early Years (archives) 