Slashdot Mirror
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."
It only makes sense that it is governed by the same laws as printed material. I mean, it has the potential of reaching just as many people...
I don't see how what a blogger posts could be any different from a person who posts a web-page discussing their personal beliefs or opinions. You find hateful slanderous material all over the internet, and your gonna crack down on people that keep what amounts to a journal online for expressing themselves? Gimme a break.
Memories become legend, Legend fades to myth, and even myth is forgotten by the time that age comes again.-Robert Jordan
_If_ bloggers are considered the same as print journalism, they should, on the balance, be happy about it. It would mean they have a right to protect their sources, for example, among other special considerations. Of course, if this implies they have all the responsibilities and none of the rights it's a different matter...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Ever hear of web server access logs? Most ISPs also keep track of who has what IP when. Unless you limit yourself to editing your blog from the public library or from open WiFi access points, "the man" can find you and squash you when "they" feel it's appropriate.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
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.
For some reason, Blogs have been treated as something special for a while. Perhaps it's the media attention to the phenomenom.
Blogs aren't anything special. They are just webpages that happen to get updated far more frequently than most. They still contain information, they should be treated like any other webpage.
They aren't diaries. If you keep a text file on your local machine for "blogging" purposes, that's comperable to a diary but the file you make available for all to see isn't.
Better solution is probably to just not host child pornography -- cuz, after all, it's pretty messed up.
Breakfast served all day!
In the early days of personal websites (out of which the phenomenon of Blogging emerged) it was this great breakthrough thing--EVERYBODY gets to be a journalist.
Nowadays everybody HAS to be a journalist!
What would the implications be if the blog were limited to subscribers or "friends" as is the case in Livejournal. Would a "terms of use" email between the two parties absolve the blogger from any accountability?
Sir, you have no proof whatsoever that the people who control our media are Jewish. Please refrain from posting such offensive garbage.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Whether it is Hollywood, the Recording Industry, Microsoft, or Joe Blow's employer firing them for an unflattering entry in their blog, the trend is clear: "Your freedom of speech exists only on paper, and we're going to make sure it isn't worth even the paper it is written on."
ConsiderIf that mentality doesn't concern you, much less send chills down your spine, then nothing will. You can't have "a little bit freedom of speech" any more than you can be "just a little bit pregnant." Any compromise of this nature must inherently mean you do not retain your freedom of speech (hint: the freedom to only do or say what is approved isn't freedom. Until people figure this out our trembling democracy will remain in need of serious triage).
The barbarians are at the gates and Rome is about to fall, and they are wearing suits and ties, wielding pens, and sidestepping the will and intent of the Consitution at every opportunity.
What is worse, we are passively letting it happen.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Look bro - kiddy porn is the root password to the Constitution (along with drug possession) so yes they WILL bust your ass anyway.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
The best rule to follow is: never say anything in email or in a posting that you would mind saying in person to everyone you know.
Information wanting to be free is a 2 edged sword.
People have no balls these days. If someone ever sends me a C&D letter, I'm going to say no. I wont bend over for anyone. I've got nothing to lose. The worst you can do is sue me, and I've got no money! What are they going to do? Jail me for writing something and putting it on a website? I doubt it. If somehow they do, then I'll do my best to become a martyr for the cause.
Knowing slashdot some of you will think I'm an idiot. But the reason that there's so much wrong going on lies mainly in the fact that people no longer stand up and fight. They sit back and take it in the ass. Every great movement in history was started by a few people who said "screw this shit!" and did something about it. So, to everyone who has gotten or will get a C&D letter from anyone. If you feel that what you were requested to cease doing is not wrong (read: wrong as in evil bad, not wrong as in illegal. What is legal and what is just are completely different) join me in saying "SCREW YOU!"
Most of the time they simply expect you to comply, it will be a great shock when you don't. Often so much of a shock that they wont even follow up. Especially when they realize the legal costs are sometimes greater than what they can get out of you.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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.
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.
He makes a great point - it's nice to hear people called out to (attempt to) make a difference. Besides, the more web loggers that stand up for their written words, the better the chances of the legal system becoming too bogged down to worry about all of my parking tickets. Er, forget I said that. Revolution!
--
mcp\kaaos
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
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
The tort of libel has never depended on the number of readers, but on the issue.
Fight Spammers!
"I can't believe how these archaic laws that are necessarily steeped in obsolete technology are being abused to limit online speech, which is by nature completely free and above the laws of any one nation."
Personally, I can't believe there are still idiots like you who believe that the internet is "special" and requires "special" laws that only apply to it. The only new questions the internet brings up are questions of jurisdiction. That's all.
"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."
You missed the entire point. It has nothing to with whether or not "Joe Sixpack" can afford a printing press or not, it's about Joe Sixpack seeking compensation and/or retribution for damage to his character through outright lies and falsehoods.
If publication A (and "publication" does include publication on the internet) says "Joe Sixpack is a child molester!" what can he do? In your idiotic worldview, he'd publish something saying "No, I'm not," but where would that leave him? He'd be a child molester in denial, that's where (and him denying it only goes to prove publication A's point). The only thing that would have done for him is to take a bite out of his wallet (even web servers aren't free).
And why should he have to do this? It's not like it's his fault that publication A lied about him. If anything, publication A should be held responsible for the damage their actions have caused.
Libel and slander laws have nothing to do with freedom of speech and everything to do with personal responsibility. Just as the Second Amendment doesn't give you the right to shoot people, the First Amendment doesn't give you the right to slander. It does nothing more than give you enough rope to hang yourself with.
And when all is said and done, I'd much rather deal with slanderous allegations in a civil trial than in the court of public opinion. Especially when the court of public opinion includes "people" who would write that last paragraph in your post.
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.
This article has nothing to do with Free Speech. You can say whatever the hell you want so long as you do not bind yourself legally not to. In this case, he violated a non-disclosure agreement. This has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech.
If I didn't know better, I'd think the Washington Post was feeling threatened and was trying to create a bit of a chilling effect on their own.
Their first example was about a cease and desist order from a _former employer_ about violating a nondisclosure agreement for merely mentioning a project. If the facts are as presented, that's no threat to free speech. First of all, since we aren't talking classified information or even trade secrets, the nondisclosure probably wasn't even violated: a nondisclosure agreement doesn't mean you aren't allowed to talk about your work in public!
Second a threat about violating a nondisclosure from a FORMER employer isn't what I call compelling. Sure, as long as you work there they've got you by the short hairs, but once you're gone the only way they can deal with you is to sue, and that's going to be a lot of work for them and no guaranteed win.
Their next example of
"Our server crashed today, and the idiot IT person at our company couldn't get the thing running." isn't likely to be actionable either, even if it isn't true. Calling someone an idiot is an opinion, not slander, unless their lawyers can twist it into making it look like you were actually claiming they were mentally defective rather than just delivering an insult.
Yeah, if you badmouth your own company in public, you might well get fired. That's as true in a web log as anywhere else. But the rest of it is mostly overblown threats.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and don't play one on the net.
P.S Oh, and if anyone thinks I speak for any of the companies I have worked for or the company I now work for -- you're out of your mind.
Everyone who didn't RTFA should. This is about (a) somebody who violated NDA; (b) somebody who was fired for posting derogatory stuff about her employer (if you don't like it don't work there!); (c) a dumbass HR consultant who said moronic things about the First Amendment; and (d) a dumbass journalist who didn't understand the issues at all, including (i) the nature of contracts with one's employer, (ii) what a C&D letter is (HINT, YOU MORONS, IT IS NOT A LAWSUIT), and (iii) the First Amendment.
sulli
RTFJ.
OK, I'm going to call bullshit on this one. I simply don't believe that they can't bust you because you don't own the computer it's on. The ISP would be able to show who is using the storage space from their logs.
I'd bet that if you rented one of those self storage garages and stored drugs in there you'd get busted just as if the drugs were in your house/apartment.
i was going to joke and say "what the hell is that, scientology," thinking it was a quote from some sci-fi book.
but google showed me to be correct on both counts.... that's some weird shit.
For reasons completely unrelated to blogging, I've long since learned to do my best to separate fact from opinion. Modifiers like "I (don't) believe", "In my opinion", and "It seems like", or even just a simple "IMHO", mark opinion clearly as such.
When I post stuff to my (or any) website, I'm fully aware that I have a potential audience of millions (even though I'm usually happy to get 5000 hits/month). I believe that postings on the net (including blogging) should have the same rights (and therefore responsibilities) as publishing a 'dead tree edition'.
I remember in one case, I was responding to someone's request to remove a neo-nazi site from a machine hosted by my employer/client. I actually gave her two responses. One was the official one. The other was a personal response given from my personal account. To make it even clearer, I prefaced my personal comments with a note that the reason why I was using a different account was to make it clear that my response was a personal opinion, not a corporate one.
I was explaining to her why I felt that the site should not be forced off the air for freedom of speech reasons, even though I (like her) found the contents repugnant.
Some years previous to that, I was working at UBC during the Clayoquot Sound protests in BC (1993). I did a good bit of posting to local usenet groups -- often using my university account after hours. For those postings, I changed my 'organization' field to 'Just Another Radical' -- once again to provide the distinction between my employer and my opinions.
Such little touches allow me to express my own opinion more freely while/by being responsible for my employers' legal fears.
As for posting on the net about what goes on at an employer where I have a non-disclosute agreement, that's just a legal minefield from day one. Even when writing about personal feelings about what occured, I'd be careful to only explain my feelings, not what occured -- until, and unless, I got an OK from my boss for the types of stuff I wanted to write about.
There's a big difference between writing about events in a personal diary vs. in a blog. A personal diary has some expectation of privacy and non-publication (at least until I get around to publishing my memoirs 30 years down the road). 'Blogs, on the other hand, start public. They have absolutely no pretense of privacy. Putting stuff that might turn out to be sensitive in such a location seems simply silly.
If I wouldn't put it in a letter to the editor (presuming that they'd publish it), then I wouldn't put it in my web log. Period.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
This has nothing to do with quashing people's freedom of speech. It has to do with quashing people's ability to lie, character assassinate, and give away stuff that isn't theirs.
So you can be held liable for giving away trade secrets online You can be held liable for violating the contract you have with your employer, you know, the guys who make sure you have money to eat. You can be held liable for making up and saying stuff about people that isn't true. Big deal. Your employment contract says "Do not disclose private company information, do not represent the company in a negative light, do not create a hostile environment for your coworkers" - it does *NOT* say "Do not do these things, EXCEPT on the internet, where you can do whatever you want."
What is amazing is that people think the internet is supposed to be some parallel dimension where they can do whatever they want without consequences.The internet is a tool, probably the best tool ever invented, but it's still just a tool. Using the internet to do something illegal isn't any different than using a baseball bat or printing press to do so.
"You are being sued for saying that Person X screws monkeys." "What? I only said that on the internet!"
paintball
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.
That's one of the lamest, most ill informed, statements I've ever seen on Slashdot (...think about that.)
The data you post to a web site that is under your control is just that, under your control. Your assertion that you are not liable for illegal material that you collected and placed on a server that is owned by someone else is fatuous. You're renting space on that server, and you're responsible for what you put in that space.
And don't get to cute about imagining you can post pseudonymously or anonymously and evade responsibility. Your IP address points right back to you. Any prosecutor worth his/her salt can get a warrant compelling your ISP to trace that info and identify the person who made the post. (Happens a lot to AOL in the Loudoun County, Virginia, courts.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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.
A blog cannot carry out the responsibilities of a print journalist unless it has a very small number of submitters. Something like Slashdot cannot do it because there's too many people putting things up on the page, in the form of comments. In a newspaper, every editorial is reviewed before being published. Every letter to the editor is looked at before it is published. Slashdot doesn't do that with it's comments, and any other blog of similar size won't do it either, because there's no time to view everyone's submissions. That is one key way in which a blog cannot be a "real" journalistic outlet at cannot be held responsible for things said on the site. But that also means it doesn't get the protection "real" journalistic outlets get.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Any company that has such an oppressive corporate climate that they monitor what their employees write in blogs is probably going to have someone go postal. That kind of environment breeds the kinds fear and paranoia that can make someone snap.
How ya like dat?