Category: Media / Sociology

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), I just noticed, has a “Legal Guide for Bloggers.” Right along the lines of my last post, it starts out:

Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.

It continues:

To be clear, this guide isn’t a substitute for, nor does it constitute, legal advice. Only an attorney who knows the details of your particular situation can provide the kind of advice you need if you’re being threatened with a lawsuit. The goal here is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected. [emphasis added]

I haven’t had the chance to review the site in full, but the table of contents covers all of the basic areas of media law. The EFF is providing an excelent service with this site, but one might guess that most bloggers visit it after they or someone they know gets into trouble. The old saying is “ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law,” but when individuals are suddenly made responsible for a long list of potential legal trouble, there is great potential for catching someone off guard or even for making baseless legal threats.

I think it’s reasonable to expect bloggers to fall under a lower standard than a media corporation with a paid legal department.

I’ve been waiting for this article. C-Net and Reuters report on attempts by South Korea to better control libel online. In the story, a girl on a subway didn’t clean up after her poopy dog and a photo of her spread across the net.

While those South Koreans who actively take part in public debate over the Internet–they are dubbed “netizens” [and are perhaps the most “wired” people in the word]–were searching for the identity of dog poop girl, innocent people were mistakenly identified and their reputations sullied.

Much like my Master’s thesis argument about how the Internet has applied centuries of copyright law on a previously-unresponsible public, this story shows how personal publishing on the net may bring the public under all of media law (libel, copyright, privacy, journalist privilege, etc.). These laws have governed media companies for years, and have developed into a system which is at times confusing, but arguably very effective.

But much the public has never had to learn about or even care about these laws.

Now, South Korea is prosecuting net-libelers, and much like some American case law and proposed legislation, is considering a law to outlaw anonymous forum posting.

Libel laws exist because defamation has correctly been determined to be a crime. However, the question that we as a society need to ask is if it is fair to immediately and blindly apply this developed law to the public (I would cautiously argue, no). There are a number of options other than using the full force of existing law. Technological controls, educating the public, and creating different standards for different types of publishers are all options that should be carefully considered. Perhaps the best option, social norms and social sanctions, has been working well thus far because they operate under “common sense” rules. It’s these types of common sense, or expected, social rules that the law should eventually come to reflect.

I don’t always agree with NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, but in a piece today on Addicted to Oil he made a brief, but very insightful remark about the development of civil society in the middle east:

The mosque became an alternative power center because it was the only place the government’s iron fist could not fully penetrate. As such, it became a place where people were able to associate freely, incubate local leaders and generate a shared opposition ideology.
That is why the minute any of these Arab countries hold free and fair elections, the Islamists burst ahead.

So the theory goes, in a repressive society which does not allow much in the way of freedom of speech, ideas will begin to flow in the places where government power is weak. Absent an open coffee house or town hall, civil society may begin to form around a more closed and perhaps radical place of worship. This really highlights the importance of place in the creation of publics.
Perhaps this is why China is going to such great lengths to control speech on the Internet.