I've always respected Ian McAnerin for his "ethical stance" posts on Search Engine Watch Forum. He has a law degree, but never practiced law according to what he openly tells us. He is, however, an experienced search marketer (SEO-SEM), and a founding member of the SMA-NA (Search Marketing Association of North America). His blog (McAnerin's Manic Meanderings) has a 9/21/05 post entitled "Traffic Power Lawsuit, Blogging, and the SMA-NA" that concerns a buyer-seller blogging Federal District Court issue that can affect all bloggers. That is, are bloggers responsible for the comments posted by other people on their blog?
In reading that post, Ian says: "In general, the existence of a particular comment in a blog does not mean that the owner exercised editorial control over it being there,..." He goes on to say: "In short, the blogger usually acts as a "carrier" rather than a "publisher" or "editor" of blog comments. The normal assumption is that people are responsible for their own comments, not the owner." Ian then says: "The Traffic Power suit goes against this idea and basically attempts to treat blogs as newspapers that edit and exercise control over their writers and content. Anyone who has been a victim of blog spam knows that's nonsense."
He then discussed this law suit with all the implied issues at stake with other paid members of the SMA-NA at the time "and decided it would be best to see what we could do about this on behalf of the SEO (Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com) and Blogger industry." Danny Sullivan even did a great post on the SEW Blog that gives more details regarding background information.
I agree with Ian's position on this, even though I have an upfront notice link on my blog that goes to a TypePad Manual statement that says: "TypePad gives you powerful controls for managing reader comments posted to your weblog. You can establish who posts comments and make sure all commenters are authenticated for security purposes. You can also control when and how comments are published." The reason I agree is that a blogger can be away on vacation, or just be swamped with trackback spam and comment spam to the point where the blogger can't keep up with it all.
The main issue, though for buyer-seller bloggers, is that just because some blogging software (not all) has "authenticating" features, is the blogger like a newspaper editor who exercises control over all content? My opinion is that a newspaper is basically a "one way" conversation, whereas a blog is a "two way" (or more) conversation! I don't want to be responsible for other people's conversation, period! I will try my best to follow my "Comments Policy", but I believe in the basic rights of Free Speech, when it comes to opinions that are presented without profanity or vulgarity. What do you think?
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