mediajunk

A piece of advice I've regularly given to clients and friends who engage in blogging, or any form of internet publishing, is to treat their posts as if they were newspaper articles.

Apart from maintaining quality, my reasoning was that, in most countries, information posted on the internet is subject to the same laws of libel and defamation as those that govern the press industry.

As the concept of blogging catches on in the US, however, legislators there are beginning to realize that it doesn't make sense to equate personal weblogs with commercial publications. Thus, "the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish," according to Wired News.

Freedom of speech activists have welcomed the decision:

Does this mean bloggers are free to slag off and slander whomever or whatever they like? No, of course not. The important point of the ruling is that bloggers can be held non-responsible for information they republish. That is, if a blogger can show that he based a post on information from another "reputable" source, then, under this ruling, he is unlikely to be held responsible for the inaccuracy and/or offending nature of that post.

If, however, a blogger takes information from a commercial news source but then changes it to the extent that it becomes a new piece of expression, he could be held responsible for that expression.

I can imagine some tricky cases where the line between "source material" and "new expression" might be hard to distinguish. For now though, this ruling favours bloggers, in one (hugely influential) part of the world at least.