Legal guide for bloggers

KUDOS to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for recently coming out with the Legal Guide for Bloggers, a compilation of FAQs to help bloggers understand their rights, and when necessary, defend their freedom.

In creating the legal guide, EFF has taken cognizance of the fact that bloggers have been getting into trouble for what they post.

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that’s under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you’re doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn’t help — in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven’t yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here’s the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn’t use the law to stifle legitimate free expression.

The guide covers three main areas — Blogger Legal Liability Issues, Bloggers as Journalists, and Other Legal Issues for Bloggers — to serve as “a basic roadmap to the legal issues” that one may confront as a blogger.

Though the legal guide is based on United States laws, the general underlying principles and situations should still apply to some extent to our local context given the existence of a (presumably) strong constitutional protection for speech here similar to the U.S. Certainly, this reference should come in handy, especially in these times.