Blogging Legally

While the legal stuff might not be the most exciting thing to read about, it’s important that you’re familiar with it so that you don’t end up in cloudy waters.

There are laws about what you can and can’t do on the Internet — specifically, the Communications Decency Act.

The purpose of this law is basically to make sure everything is fair and appropriate.

Can Bloggers Publish Whatever They Want?

Absolutely, positively no!

The best advice is to keep your blogs factual, professional, courteous, and relevant.

There is no reason a blog for a corporation, organization, or worthy cause should be involved in slanderous or libelous blog postings in the first place.

☞ Fast Fact: Hal Turner, a New Jersey blogger, faces up to 10 years in prison for commenting that three Chicago judges “deserve to be killed.”

There have been recent court cases in which bloggers have lost large settlements for what they have posted online, including an $11.3 million lawsuit in Florida.

This appears to be a growing trend, as various bloggers are being taken to court for what they have posted.

Remember that freedom of speech is a right of every American and is one of the pillars of democracy.

This entire chapter on the legalities of blogging is based entirely on United States of America law.

For legal guidance on blogging in other countries, you need to contact your local legislature or communications commission.

How Am I Protected as a Blogger?

As a blogger, it is important that you understand and recognize the fact that you may be held responsible for what you say.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides you with protection for “user-generated” content that may be published on your blog (there are some exceptions that we will discuss).

So, if Section 230 affords you protection, why are people paying millions of dollars in libel and slander lawsuits?

The reason is that you are responsible for what you post as a blogger; however, the law, which was designed to promote free speech, protects you (as an ISP, Webmaster, administrator, etc.) from the content that “other” bloggers may post on your blog.

It will provide you protection for the content published by others that may be considered slander, defamation, or libel, but it does not provide any protection for federal crimes or intellectual property violations.

This means that you can be held liable if any of these types of activities take place on your blog.

So, if someone who posts on a blog may be held liable, how do you (or law enforcement) know who these individuals really are since they hide behind an online account?

Recent court cases have required blog administrators and blog hosting companies to turn over identifying information pursuant to legal cases.

How Do I Avoid Legal Problems?

Include a disclaimer on your blog related to privacy, and monitor for criminal behavior and intellectual rights infringements.

If you keep your blog on topic, this should never be an issue for you.

Clearly indicate that you will release any privacy information (user names, real names, e-mail addresses, contact, or personal information) to law enforcement authorities pursuant to a criminal investigation.

Do not allow copyright material to be published on your blog.

Do not allow criminal conduct, comments, discussions, or anything related on your blogs.

Remove this type of content immediately.

Keep in mind that the law surrounding the Internet and online communications is changing all the time, and, as more blog-related cases make it through United States courts, these decisions may ultimately affect the law or the interpretation of the law.

Be attentive to the ever-changing landscape of legal issues related to blogging.

5 Most Common Mistakes that Lead to Lawsuits (Jain 2015) Defamation: damaging someone’s reputation Copyright Infringement: using copyrighted content without permission Tortious Interference: provoking someone to break a contract Right of Publicity: using someone else’s name on the Internet without their permission Product Disparagement: false statements about a product that affect its success in the marketplace

Blogging Legal Review

The real problem you will have with blog spam is comments that are posted on your blog.

Most blog software applications have built-in spam filters; make sure these are turned on.

You can also turn on features such as “approval” before a comment can actually be posted to your blog.

You can also use spam blacklists to blacklist specific words and phrases from appearing on your blog.

Journalism Shield Laws and the
Free Flow of Information Act

Are bloggers journalists, and are they protected from revealing sources just as similar laws protect journalists?

Even though bloggers are often journalists by profession, the laws protecting bloggers as journalists are a very grey area.

A “shield law” provides a news reporter or journalist with the right to refuse to testify about information and/or sources of information obtained during the course of research, confidential informants, protected sources in the process of investigating, and collecting, gathering, or disseminating news information.

Currently, there is no federal shield law, and the rules vary from state to state.

The shield law is designed to protect journalists, so a blogger must be able to substantiate that they meet the definition of a journalist, which has proven to be very difficult without education, training, and credentials.

The bottom line is if you don’t work for a newsgathering organization or company, you probably aren’t protected.

But, there is hope with the Free Flow of Information Act, which may afford the same protection to bloggers as it does journalists.

You can read the Act at www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/987.

Privacy data for your readers and subscribers

You can’t have full control over the posting of information on your blog at all times.

Likewise, you can only take so much action to prevent criminal activities or those involving slanderous or libelous blog postings by others.

You have to include a disclaimer on your blog related to privacy, monitoring for criminal behavior, and intellectual rights infringements.

Keep your blog on topic, and this should never been an issue for you.

An example of a good privacy policy can be viewed at www.bigfatblog.com/about/privacy.

Deleting content from your blog

This one will drive you crazy. You own your website and your blog.

However, you do not necessarily own the content. If you allow others to post comments and add content or reviews, you don’t own it.

This is considered an original work, and it’s protected under copyright laws as the property of the author.

The simple solution for this goes back to your terms of service that users must agree to when posting on your website or blog.

They must agree that they surrender rights to anything published on your website or blog and that you have the right to modify or delete content as you see appropriate.

Having this agreement in your terms of service protects you.

Without this, you may tread into dangerous waters by modifying posts without permission of the author (or owner).

If your blog is fairly small, you may not have any issues, but if your blog gains traction and more and more people start to see it, you’re more likely to get into legal trouble.

People are crazy — we know.

Monitoring your blog for criminal activity

You must monitor your blogs for criminal activity in accordance with the Communications Decency Act.

You may be protected under Section 230 for libelous or slanderous comments; however, you are not protected from criminal activity or intellectual property violations.

Intellectual property violations may be things such as distributing copyright music or DVDs.

If you allow criminal activity on your website or your blog, you are subject to prosecution. Bottom line: Don’t allow it, and delete it when and if it is posted on your blog.

Using images

Unless you own an image or it is royalty-free, you shouldn’t post it.

A common practice is to “grab” images from other Web pages.

Copyright infringement occurs whenever copyrighted material is transferred to or from a website without authorization from the copyright owner; this applies to content and images.

Transferring information to and from a website can be done in several ways.

You can take information from a website by copying or downloading it.

Material can be uploaded from your computer to a Web server, or you can use an inline link to “pull” the image into your blog by calling that image URL but not physically pulling the image file onto your blog.

As part of your terms of service, include that you retain the right to modify content to remove linking or copyright images.

This section merely scratches the surface of the foggy and ever-changing legalities surrounding blogging.

It can be a hassle to understand, but as long as you know the basics (and use common sense), you should be fine.

☞ FunFact: A Google search now yields almost 20 million results for “sued over a negative review.”

FROM THE EXPERTS: PRIYA SHAH

Technorati reports that 30,000 to 40,000 new blogs are being created each day. According to David Sifry, part of the growth of new blogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs. What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites. They contain robot-generated posts made up of random words, with the title linking back to the blogger’s own pages. Many bloggers see them as a way of getting their pages indexed quickly by Google and other search engines. Sifry estimates that about 20 percent of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses. Those in the SEO world are well aware of this. There are even services like Blogburner that encourage creation of spammy blogs and spam-pinging to get your sites indexed quickly. As a blogging evangelist, I wholeheartedly recommend blogging as an SEO tactic. But I also emphasize that you should use your blog for more than just SEO. At the Spam Squashing Summit, blog services decided to collaborate to report and combat blog-spamming. Technorati currently claims to catch about 90 percent of spam and remove it from the index. They also notify the blog-hosting operators. But, I believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As I write this, there are software and robots being created that will create spam-blogs more efficiently and in ways that will be harder to detect. The SEO “black hats” are always far ahead of the technology and safeguards that these services can put in place. Take down a few spam-blogs and hundreds more will arise. Blogging evangelist and PR guru, Steve Rubel, sums up this dilemma rather well on his Micropersuasion blog, www.micropersuasion.com. He believes that it is human nature for people to exploit new technologies, and that it’s really up to the search engines to help put a stop to these by undercutting the economics of blogspam, much like they did with no follow and comment spam. But the trade-off is that such a move would also reduce any impact that blogs have on search results. Fact: The more you abuse a technology, the less effective it becomes. Spam blogging will force search engines like Google to change their ranking algorithms and eventually assign less value to links from blogs. Unless they put in safeguards to prevent robots from taking over, it is safe to assume that blogging will become less effective as an SEO tactic over time. Of course, the spammers will then just have to find new avenues and means to spam the engines. But why ruin a good thing in the first place? Blogs are much more than just tools for search engine optimization. A blog can be a great tool for personal branding and building relationships with your website visitors and customers. Instead of using blogs for spam, focus on building content-rich sites and getting high-value links to them. Don’t restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits of blogging. Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your marketing and public relations strategy and use them the way they were meant to be used. Priya (pronounced ‘pree-yaa’) Florence Shah lives in a suburb of India’s financial capital, Mumbai. She is an Internet publisher, marketer, entrepreneur, and full-time mom.