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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.
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.
"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.