This post is a follow-up to my "Is A Blogger A 'Carrier' or 'Editor' of Blog Comments" post. The cartoon represents an attorney-detective using Google to find information that will help substantiate their side of the buyer-seller blogging, Federal District Court Issue currently in progress.
The importance of this case, in my opinion, is reinforced by the 10/17/& 18/05 BlogOn2005 Conference just completed as more and more sellers use the social media of blogs for "Buzz Marketing". Hopefully, buyers will also use them to help find ethical and value driven sellers. But, the issues in this case can get complicated (will need detective-legal research work), as Ian McAnerin seemed to do in his latest blog post on the subject.
Ian's post entitled "Blog Comment Legal Issues in the News" is a long post, but well worth the read as his post accomplishes a better comprehension of the legal points involved. He quotes the news article as saying: "Will bloggers be treated like newspaper reporters, protected by the First Amendment but subject to libel and defamatory laws, or will they be treated like common carriers," such as telephone companies, and not held liable for what other people write and say?"
Ian's previous legal training shines through in his discussion of what he considers to be the bottom line: "It all boils down to control. Control equals responsibility, most of the time. The more control you have over the results, the more responsible you are for them." However, he then says: "Just because a common carrier *can* exercise control doesn't mean that they do, or should be expected to. If they did, they would probably lose their common carrier status."
This is an excellent point in my opinion, as bloggers may wants to WARN comment posters about the POTENTIAL of their comments being subject to something like a TypePad "Managing Comments" process, but bloggers don't want to be forced to spend their individual (no editorial staff in most cases), limited time being held responsible for other people's comments. This is especially true with the growth of automated "comment spam". It would not only hold back many potential bloggers from blogging, and dramatically hurt the growth of blogging, it would also probably cause the courts to conclude that bloggers are not common carriers, due to the amount of control they may be forced to exercise. As a blogger, how do you feel about this?
Cartoon courtesy of Google Blogoscoped.
Comments