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."

Comments

Makes sense...

[Overloadplanetunreal]

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...

Rights of a blogger

[davidmcn]

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.

Two-edged sword

[JanneM]

_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...

Re:Duh!

[eyegor]

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.

It does make sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Duh!

[PCM2]

Better solution is probably to just not host child pornography -- cuz, after all, it's pretty messed up.

Re:rediculous

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

media and justice systems being run by the Washington fat cats and the Jewish media moguls in New York and Hollywood

Sir, you have no proof whatsoever that the people who control our media are Jewish. Please refrain from posting such offensive garbage.

Corporatizing the Death of Democracy

[FreeUser]

This underscores why the greatest dangers to our freedoms, including our freedom of speech, doesn't come from our government (although it is a threat, as current trends toward greater authoritariansim in the terrorist hysteria left by the wake of 9/11), but from private enterprise, corporations, and simple, unfettered greed.

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."

Consider

"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."

If 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.

Re:Corporatizing the Death of Democracy

[arkanes]

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.

Re:Corporatizing the Death of Democracy

[Fnkmaster]

Wrong. I hate to tell you but the ENTIRETY of American jurisprudence exists because rights aren't absolute, but rather exist in balance with each other. While I hold the First Amendment particularly dear to my heart (and I'm pretty sure there's a reason it comes first in the list), it still exists only in balance with other fundamental rights, as outlined by the constitution, common law practices, and jurisprudence. I think this basic principle is pretty much the same in the legal systems of all democratic countries.

I do not of course claim that the judicial system does a perfect or even near perfect job at upholding our rights, and often makes the fallacious assumption that a corporation's rights should be on par with the rights of large numbers of individual citizens, or often even superceding them. While corporations should be treated justly under the law, their "right to profit" or "right to not be criticized by individuals" don't exist in the constitution and should never be seen as higher priority than something as fundamental to our society as the First Amendment. But, that being said, there are laws about libel and slander, jurisprudence about the difference between commercial speech and political speech and so on that try to clarify all the intermediate grey areas and fill in the gaps that the Constitution doesn't specify. And that is, at its heart, a good thing. Perhaps we should push for more accountability in the judicial branch, and perhaps we should elect a President that will appoint judges who aren't fucking corporate whores, mmm?

Re:Duh!

[TerryAtWork]

Look bro - kiddy porn is the root password to the Constitution (along with drug possession) so yes they WILL bust your ass anyway.

Ahh, the memories of Usenet

[hacksoncode]

This reminds me of my early days in Usenet.

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.

Re:Ahh, the memories of Usenet

[Kaa]

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.

There is a better rule. You should never post onto the Usenet/Web anything that you would mind saying in person to everyone you know, or anything that you'd be uncomforable with when it's pulled out of the archives twenty years later.

I know several people who were highly embarassed when Google made available old Usenet postings...

No balls

[Apreche]

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.

Whats the American court system to do

[TerryAtWork]

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.

Re:rediculous

[Guppy06]

"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.

Nonsense.

[kevlar]

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.

Blogs as regulated speech? *snort*

[russotto]

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.

Re:Duh!

[jerrytcow]

For instance, if you get free storage from a free hosting site, and you put, say, child porno on that site, do you own the child porno? No. So you can't get busted for posession. The trick is to keep stuff off of your computer and host it on someone else's computer.

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.

opinion vs fact

[Black Copter Control]

In my view, blogging is publishing (so is posting on slashdot).

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.

Re:Isn't that ironic?

[karlandtanya]

This is the problem:

"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?

Re:Duh!

[eddy the lip]

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)