Legal editor needs clue - send to Guardian Unlimited.
20:32 Monday 22 Oct 07
“Warning to abusive bloggers as judge tells site to reveal names” says the Guardian Unlimited.
Just one tiny problem - the article mentions 2 forums.
Forums are not blogs, forum posts are not blog posts, forum users are not bloggers.
I honestly thought the Guardian had more of a clue.
Court orders obliging websites to disclose the identity of users posting anonymous defamatory remarks began in 2001.
That may be true, but if we take this blog for instance I can reveal no more than you can see. Sure I have the email addresses but if you are really going to have a go at someone then you shouldn’t use your email. And even then it proves nothing because you can put anyone’s details there. There are a surprising amount that start comments@ blog@ wordpress@ and none are real. So as a blog owner who requires no registration - and therefore a verifiable address - for use I can’t see that I could be held accountable. I’m sure some lawyer somewhere would say that I am. “I” also being “us bloggers”.
But then abuse is the least of it - linking is illegal now.
1
With the linking thing, there’s a series of cases in a Canadian court right now which, if the guy wins, will make sites responsible for the content of the web sites they link to… Random Dude is suing all kinds of sites, including search engines, for libel. With the amount of money involved in just defending themselves, several bloggers — including a bunch who simply linked to blogs which linked to blogs which talked about him — have already closed their sites down rather than go to court. There’s a real possibilty the court is going to require information keeping which is beyond what most blogs/forums allow for at the moment…
As for the privacy issue, I was just having this conversation — mostly with myself — on my Salted blog. My suggestion to anyone starting an email or Facebook/MySpace account is to lie. According to the info I hand out when I start a Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail account I’m an 84-years old female American astronaut living in the 90210 Zip Code.
00:44 Tuesday 23 Oct 07