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Free Speech And WebLogs
welloy writes "The WashingtonPost has an article regarding free speech and web logs. Its focus is on how web logs are governed by the same laws/rules of standard print journalism. The header quote: "Bloggers" surprised by legal limits on Web journals."
Nothing in the article is too suprising if you take a minute and think about it. Blogs are print, thus there is an obligation to mark opinion as opinion, and not try to present it as fact. The difference will be instead of seeing:
Person X is an incompetant fool.
It will be seen as:
I think Person X is an incompetent fool.
There's no real difference except that one statement can be called libel. It's not like they are trying to make Bloggers apply journalistic standards to their writing. It's more like a heads up warning them to be more careful how they commit things to print.
This reminds me of the Brad Pitt diary/blog that existed on Diaryland from 4/2000 to 12/2000.
It was expertly written (incognito at the time) by the well-known diarylander Uncle Bob, until a cease-and-desist order was issued by Brad Pitt's legal team.
It was insanely funny, and no one would've ever actually believed that it was Mr. Pitt, but someone got their panties in a wad over it.
-- he's not heavy, he's my sysadmin!
I think the reason why the government is making arcane internet laws is because they are scared, nothing has ever been this powerful, to think that I can make my own website and host it for less than one hundered dollars and talk about how George W. Bush the president is a crack whore. The government is worried more about what someone is going to say, and working on getting them arrested or removed or killed. I personally think the first ammendment right should apply online. But hey, I also think we should end the war on terrorisim and make microsoft go away and let Linux take over.
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Regulation of print journalism was necessary because the barriers to entry were so high; it was not reasonable to expect Joe Sixpack to purchase his own printing press and retaliate against libellous allegations...
I saw an interesting alternative reason (I wish I could remember where): It's not the expense of publishing a rebuttal that is significant, but rather the difficulty of bringing the rebuttal to the attention of people who may have seen the original libelous statement. I think this alternative argument *is* applicable to "publishing" on the internet.
Exactly right. The whole point of Constitutional rights is that they are inherent, essential rights that must not be abridged. The very idea that there exists a "practical compromise" between then and ANYTHING is offensive.
If the libelous blog is published anonymously from a server in, say, Lebanon?
There's only two real rules in cyberspace that apply everywhere.
1 - Large prime factors are hard to find.
2 - Everything is a bitstream.
That's it - everything else is a matter of quaint local customs and luck, good or bad.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Regulation of print journalism was necessary because the barriers to entry were so high; it was not reasonable to expect Joe Sixpack to purchase his own printing press and retaliate against libellous allegations. The Internet does away with all that.
;-) ).
;-)
I actually modded you up, but wanted to reply (sorry
This is a very good point, but there are very interesting legal and ethical questions. If, say the Drudge Report slanders me--is it also libel as it would be in print?
Sure, I can respond with my own web page, but no one will see it. In other words, I don't have an equal chance to make my point and defend myself. This can cause actual monetary and emotional damages.
I think such protection should be required or else large internet media outlets could abuse their power.
However, if I slander someone on my web page--only my family and a few friends will ever really know. It would clearly be restrictive if we all needed libel insurance to publish a web page.
I think the answer--as it does in the print world---will have to lie in page views. After a certain amount of people have seen it--it goes from slander to libel.
Andrewsullivan.com: Subject to libel laws
Talkingpointsmemo.com: Subject to libel laws
Livejournal.com/~aneng: Not subject
This is all sort of a side point anyway. The article mostly deals with people getting fired for breaking company policies. (First rule of fight club, don't talk about your company
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I have this on good authority. It may alert them to your presence and cause them to raid your house, but if when they raid the house they find nothing in your posession, you're scott free.
Don't be an idiot.
Do you really want to explain to a jury of regular middle-class people that "Yes, this picture of a 10-year-old being fisted was on my free website, and it came from my IP, but you didn't find it on my hard drive, so na-na na-na-na, you have to let me go free"??
And also, I have it on good authority that you can buy a Brooklin Bridge really cheap...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
"Everybody gets to be a journalist."
It is the nature of power to concentrate itself. I'm not speaking about any "evil, corrupt conspiracy"; just the nature of power. Make no mistake about it, speech and the right to be heard is POWER. That's why it's protected by the FIRST amendment to the US Constitution.
The problem with "everybody is a journalist" is that the power of speech becomes distributed among the masses. This is not a stable (as in equilibruim) situation. It will not persist. It cannot persist.
I like the idea of a "frontier", where everybody pretty much does whatever they want and leaves each other alone. If ever there was an ideal "place" for such a frontier to exist, the internet is it. It's potentially infinite in size. Participation is piecewise voluntary--if you don't like what's going on, you can simply take what you want and leave the rest. Heck, there's software that will ignore it for you. Most people can live with that.
Citizens, it ain't gonna happen. Some, however, have a need to control everything they're aware of. Not many, actually, and even fewer that can do it effectively. But enough so that when that sort of person notices something--even something that has nothing to do with them--they feel a need to control it. Why does Pat Robertson want to control the behaviour of two gay lovers in their own house? Because as surely as those lovers say they were made to be gay, Pat was made with a desire to control. It's his nature. Once such people become aware of the internet as a place, those people have a need to control it. And some of them have the talent necessary to accomplish the task. The "tragic flaw" of the Libertarian ideal is that it doesn't want to control anything (Shut up, I said "ideal").
As long as we persist in the delusion that the internet will remain an unregulated frontier, we are lost.
Rules and laws will regulate the internet.
We do not get to choose whether the regulations are applied. We do, however, get to choose what those regulations will be.
A successful effort at preserving freedom will not be based an anarchistic ideal.
Successfully preserving freedom depends on the creation of regulations that specifically reserve rights to the people.
Do this exercise: Choose a state of in which power is distributed. Choose another in which power is concentrated. Examine the initial ideals of those states. Now investigate the political structure of those states. You'll find that societies whose legal and political structure are consistent with their original ideals were engineered with the more skull-sweat than a chemical plant or successful operating system.
Starry-eyed dreamers saying "why can't we all just get along" will NOT achieve their goals. Political and legal engineers will. We need to get the engineers working for us. Can you name the profession these "engineers" pursue?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Putting aside the flame-inducing child porn reference, you're still way off. The host is more like a news stand, and you're the author of what they're distributing.
This is about authorship. If I post on a blog "Hilary Rosen is a heroin addict, it's affecting her judgement, and I have proof, here are the pictures [insert doctored photos here]", she can sue your ass for libel, and rightfully so (assuming you don't have real proof that she is, of course). There's no reason web content should be immune from standard libel laws, or other laws that govern free speech.
Of course, they should also be protected by those same laws. What's really distressing are moves by various entities that are trying to exert more control over online publishing than they'd have over traditional media.
IJBT (I've Just Been Trolled)
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
Hehe. I got cease and desisted by the MPAA for distributing DeCSS back when I was in college (I had a web page with a bunch of DVD-related downloads, including DeCSS, LiViD project info and so on). I did fight it, and publicize it - was written up in the Harvard Crimson. But you see, I was a senior at Harvard University, and it turned out I did have something to lose - my diploma at the end of the year. Thanks, DMCA. To the US Congress - suck my gonads.
One thing I love about the Internet is that it screws with so many accepted institutions, often revealing how heavily they rely on assumptions about things like distance, scale and difficulty, and how fragile they are when those assumptions stop working.
The ideas of libel and slander evolved in a world where there were major practical differences between privacy and publicity. It was easy to outlaw certain things in public declarations while still allowing people to speak freely in personal conversations and private letters. Now along comes the Internet, which not only gives individuals the capability to publish their private thoughts to the whole world with ease, but lets them do it in a way that feels as normal and natural as writing a letter to a friend. Or for that matter, loaning someone a book or whistling a popular song in public. It's definitely not a given that people should be prohibited from treating the world as a big group of close friends, or that the limits created for a world in which that was impossible should continue to apply.
While there are such things as trade secrets and business confidentiality, a company's right to limit its employees freedom to speak about things that go on at work should not be unlimited. I understand that companies have good, practical reasons to want to control absolutely everything that's said about them. But they don't necessarily have the right to do it.
Most of us are used to the idea that our companies can limit what we say about them. We could just as easily get used to the idea that a lot of people shoot their mouths off meaninglessly in blogs and learn to ignore most of it. In my mind this would be better than going in the other direction and treating everybody on Earth like a 20th century publisher.
An interesting quote from the article:
"With the advent of cyberspace, we've had to evolve these policies," Farr said. "Somewhere between First Amendment rights and total repression there is a practical middle ground."
It's one thing to enforce NDA's that an employee willfully signed its another thing to find some "middle-ground" with rights in the first amendment. The whole point of calling something a right is to say that there is no middle ground.... a "right" is an absolute... otherwise we would call it first amendment privileges.
If you don't voluntarily sign away a right with an NDA, you should have complete freedom to exercise that right. I think Madison and Jefferson would back me up here.
Too often management types think they can freely bend the rules in order to make their job easier and they never really worry about what the long term negative effect on society of reducing the rights of employees to speak their minds.
Just look at how the ITAR restrictions on academic speech are killing the American Aerospace Industry, and how DMCA is killing research into encryption.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased