A number of situations regarding the right to blog or comment freely have come up in the past few months. Some involve the terms of service of sponsoring companies, while others involve the courts and legal issues pertaining to blogging.

What is clear is that there is an emerging ethical and legal framework to blogging. Bloggers who engage in vulgarity, violate terms of service, leak confidential data, or publish defamatory or infringing information online do so at their own risk and forfeit their “right to privacy.” But so do those who complain about blogs.

Last November, Kurt Greenbaum, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, outed someone who had left what he considered a vulgar comment on the Post-Dispatch’s blog at STLtoday.com - in spite of the newspaper’s stated policy that it “will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, [it] may provide information to legal officials.” The outed commenter subsequently resigned from his job following an investigation. Greenbaum then wrote about the situation in a blog post titled “Post a vulgar comment while you’re at work, lose your job.”

In December, Condé Nast, publisher of GQ, Vogue, Teen Vogue, and Lucky magazines, filed a copyright infringement and violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse suit against the blog FashionZag and unknown users of that blog for hacking into its computer system and publishing material belonging to Condé Nast on both it and on bayimg.com, an image-hosting site. Condé Nast was permitted to subpoena Google and AT&T, respectively, as hosts of the FashionZag blog and the IP address of the alleged hacker, to discover the identities of the bloggers and alleged hackers involved.

But although the federal Communications Decency Act provides that website owners are exempt from legal liability for defamatory material uploaded to their sites by users, it does not require that the owners remove the material. Many site owners will do this voluntarily, especially if the material violates their terms of service policies, but not always.

Martin Singer, the attorney for actress Demi Moore, wrote a letter to photographer Anthony Citrano demanding that he retract all blog and Twitter posts in which he claimed that a cover photo of Moore on W magazine’s December issue was altered in a non-flattering way.

In a recent lawsuit, although U.S. District Court Judge James Holderman (northern district of Illinois) had previously ruled that while authors had posted material appearing on Ripoff Report, a consumer advocacy website, that was deemed defamatory to the plaintiffs, the authors never removed the material from the site. The plaintiffs wrote to Ripoff Report, asking it to remove the material. Holderman wrote that he agreed with Ripoff Report’s argument that Ripoff Report itself can’t be required to remove the material as it was not a party to the case. The plaintiffs were left with no true recourse for the alleged damage to their reputations.

The aforementioned actions clearly indicate that blogging comes with journalistic responsibility to respect privacy and intellectual property rights and not to make defamatory statements. But to complain about a blog post may actually result in more people seeing the material that one wants removed- the ironic and opposite effect of the complainer’s intent. Controversy drives blog views. So go ahead and blog and complain – but do so at your own risk.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 11:22 am and is filed under Editing Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.