Where once the plagiarist would have to re-type the paper or repaint the portrait, content theft now is just a mouse click or a keyboard shortcut away. Worse yet, whole technologies have been built around content theft. For example, RSS scraping applications can steal the content from thousands of feeds in a single hour, creating countless spam blogs.

However, technology is a double-edged sword. At the same time it has made content theft easier than ever, it has also empowered content producers with new, more powerful means of monitoring and enforcing their content rights.

No longer does a copyright holder have to wait to accidentally discover plagiarism or hope that a bystander will alert them, no longer is enforcement a long, arduous process. Every Webmaster, no matter how small, has the tools they need to track and stop theft of their content.

It is simply a matter of knowing where to look.

Prevention

Preventing content theft is something of a holy grail. It is the perfect solution, but also the least practical. The tools needed to prevent copying of work generally do more to annoy legitimate users than to stop plagiarists. That being said, there are a few prevention tools worth taking a look at.

Pictureshark – A hard to remove transluscent watermark is by far the most effective method of preventing image theft. Pictureshark is a fast, free and powerful batch image watermarking tool that can process hundreds of images with a variety of effects.

Devpapers .htaccess Hotlink Protection- For Webmasters that pay their bandwidth bills, image hotlinking is a double problem. Not only is it a form of content theft, but also of bandwidth theft as every load of the plagiarist’s page requires the image be pulled from the original server. Webmasters should test to see if their images can be hotlinkied and, if they can, consider editing the .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking or use a PHP script to achieve that end.

Bad Behavior – A PHP script available for most CMS platforms, Bad Behavior is an anti-spam tool that can also be used to stop some forms of automated content theft. Though not necessarily useful against RSS scraping, any “evil” bots that visit your sites, no matter for what reason, are likely to be caught in Bad Behavior’s net. This can stop malicious spidering and automated saving of content.

Watermark.Ws – Don’t have time to download software to watermark your images? Use Watermark.ws and add your overlays on the Web. Watermark.Ws lets you add text or an image over your copyrighted work and set the alpha level, enabling centrally-located and more powerful watermarks.

Detection

Detecting content theft, though not as desireable as prevention, is a much easier method. There are many tools that can easily detect content theft and, from there, one can easily follow up on it. Best of all, this has no impact on the legitimate readers of your site, just the those that abuse your content.

Google Alerts – Rather than searching for your own content by hand from time to time, let Google Alerts do it for you. Punch in a few unique phrases from your work, set Google Alerts to inform you when those phrases appear on the Web and relax. Best of all, it can be combined with other tools below for an even more powerful experience.

Copyscape – Based upon the Google API, Copyscape enables you to search for plagiarism of an entire page. It looks for content theft that traditional Google searches and Google Alerts may miss including sites that take only a part of your work. The free version is very limited and will only display the top ten results. Thus, it may not be practical for sites that allow some reuse of their content.

Digital Fingerprint Plugin – Maxpower’s Digital Finger Plugin for WordPress appends a unique phrase or key to the end of every post in your RSS feed. It then offers tools to help you search for that fingerprint on the Web. The plugin also works well with Google Alerts.

Technorati Watchlists – Much like Google Alerts, Techorati watchlists can be used to inform you instantly when unique keywords or a fingerprint appears on another blog. A very powerful tool for blogs.

Google Image Search – Detecting image plagiarism is very difficult, however, if you give your images unique file names you can search for that name in Google image search and locate duplicates of it that way. Most plagiarists do not bother to change image names when putting it up on their site, making it very easy to spot such infringements.

Cessation

Once plagiarism has been detected, it has to be stopped before the detection is of any use. Fortunately, there are several tools to help.

Copyfeed – A veritable swiss-army knife of content protection, Copyfeed not only adds a digital fingerprint to detect infringement, but also can be used to embed IP address of RSS scrapers in the posts andt hen, in turn, ban them from accessing the feed. For WordPress users, this plugin is practically a must-have.

Ebay VeRO Program – If your content regularly appears on Ebay, it might be worth your time to sign up for Ebay’s Verified Rights Owner Program to enable you to easily close auctions that infringe upon your rights. VeRO is easily the most powerful program of its kind on the Web and worthwhile for any Webmaster that finds a great deal of their work on Ebay.

Reporting

Sometimes, when stopping plagiarism or content theft, you can not take action yourself and, instead, have to report it to someone else. In those cases, there are many different tools and resources to help.

Domain Tools – Need to quickly find out who the host is of a dot com? Domain Tools can help. Just type in the domain and you’ll get all of the information you need about the site. Under “Server Data” you can easily locate all of the information about the server, including who operates it.

DMCA Templates – If you’re going to report a site to a U.S.-based host, you are going to need to file a DMCA notice. To do that, you’ll need a DMCA template. Fortunately, Ian McAnerin has posted templates of DMCA notices on his site, including one for each of the major search engines and a generic ISP one.

Plagiarism Today’s DMCA Contact Information – Once you know who the host is, the question becomes who to contact there. On my site, I’ve compiled a list of links to over 100 of the largest hosts, advertising networks and search engines. If you notice infringing content on a site hosted by one of these companies, just follow the link to report it. Odds are the company you need is somewhere on the list.

U.S. Copyright Office DMCA List – Similar to the list on my site, the United States Copyright Office maintains a list of DMCA contact information for various hosts. Though their list has many more companies, many major hosts have not registered and others have let their information fall out of date. However, it remains an excellent backup. This site requires Acrobat Reader or another PDF viewer to use.

Signature Extension – Instead of copying and pasting the template in every time it is needed, it is much easier to use the Signature Firefox extension and drop it in. Works great with shorter blocks of text and any template you might have use for. Functions well with Webmail systems as well as online reporting systems such as what is found at LiveJournal.

Non-Repudiation

Finally, in the event of a dispute regarding the ownership of the work, it may be important to have some evidence that the work is truly yours. With that in mind, there are some great services to help you verify the creation of your work.

Numly – Numly’s ESN system enables users to register their content, which is then fingerprinted and timestamped, and receive a special number that can be used to retrieve all of the pertinent information on it. Free accounts offer three ESNs per month. A WordPress plugin is available.

Registered Commons – From the Creative Commons team comes Registered Commons. Like Numly, RC lets you register your work, receive a certificate and an identification number and gives you a timestamp plus a fingerprint of the work. Both Numly and RC allow you to embed Creative Commons Licenses into your work. RC is completely free to use.

Archive.org – The Web Archive, which famously indexes and preserves old versions of Web pages, makes it possible to backtrack and see roughly how long a page was up. Though not as exact as an ESN or a Registered Commons registration, it can be useful in cases where the work was not registered and only a rough answer is needed.

Furl – Though not a non-repudiation service, Furl can be useful in preserving evidence against a plagiarist. A social bookmarking site, Furl also saves a cached copy of every page saved to it, this can be very useful if the plagiarist changes the page or removes the content. It is also valuable for your own records to have a file of what you did and why, just in case the issue comes up again later.

Conclusions

While technology has been kind to the plagiarist, it has been at least as kind to the author. For the first time in history and individual, without any great expense, can reach a worldwide audience and get his message out in numbers never before dreamed of.

Yes, with it comes a risk of plagiarism and content theft, but solutions are being created to mitigate that risk and streamline the process of protecting content and securing author’s rights.

It is and will continue to be a bumpy road, but if one knows how to navigate it, the ride can be more than tolerable.

The post The 20 Best Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools appeared first on The Blog Herald.

This means, fairly soon, you could start seeing sites like http://www.site.love, http://www.site.beauty and http://www.site.toys, among many others.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be snapping up your own .baby or .love domain any time soon, many of the extensions may wind up being controlled by private organizations, such as L’oreal’s bid to control .beauty, where there are obvious business interests in the TLD itself, not in selling new domains. As such, many of those applications are for closed registrations, meaning that the operators of the extension will be selective in who they allow to register.

This has already sparked a predictable and understandable fear of corporate control over the Internet. But while the discussion about the balance between corporate control and Internet freedom is important, it’s also important to ask why ICANN is so eager to expand the number of extensions so quickly and what the impact of that expansion could be on the Internet.

Sadly, if previous expansions have taught us anything, it’s probably the latter.

Empty Expansions from the Past

According to a recent industry brief from Verisign (PDF), at the end of 2012, there were over 252 million registered TLDs. Of those, over 100 million were .com, making it the runaway leader. The next most popular TLD, .de (the extension for Germany), had less than 20 million.

Most people equate the words “dot com” with the Internet itself. The .com TLD is hands down the most popular, most valuable and most desirable out of them all. This has led, understandably, to a concern that the extension is becoming too crowded. It is definitely getting more difficult, and in some cases more expensive, to acquire a good .com domain.

So opening up new TLDs seems like a natural solution. If you want to open up a dating site but dating.com is (predictably) taken, then you could use dating.love or dating.smile.

While this sounds good, it’s been tried before. ICANN has preivously opened up other TLDs to take pressure off of .com and, to date, they’ve all been pretty big failures.

For example, take a look at the .biz and .info TLDs. These TLDs have been around for years and, according to the Verisign report listed above, .info is only the 6th most popular and is actually decreasing in popularity (including both the number of domains registered and position in the list). .biz, on the other hand, failed to even break the top ten and is simply included in the “Other” list.

Currently, there are hundreds of TLDs that are available. The majority of TLDs are operated by a specific country, and many are restricted to a specific purpose or to the home country, but there is still no shortage of new TLDs to choose from and most of them have very few registrations, especially compared to .com.

Adding 1,500+ new TLDs isn’t going to change the popularity of .com and it’s dominance. It’s just going to create more problems for people who already hold .com domains and cause more confusion among users of the Web.

The Trademark Problem

Imagine for a moment that you own a business, Widgets.com. Like any smart webmaster, you currently own the .net, .org and other TLDs for your business name.

Now imagine that 1,500 new TLDs come online, many of which are open for anyone to register. You’re faced with a difficult decision, do you, at great expense, register all of those TLDs, to protect your brand? Do you wait and see which become popular and register those (hoping to beat anyone else to them)? Or do you not register any and hope for the best?

If someone registered a domain using your trademark in bad faith, ICANN has a process that lets you dispute that registration and even get the domain for yourself it it was infringing. However, that process, known as the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP), is incredibly expensive, costing at least $1,300 (see section 17 in the PDF).

This is extremely cost prohibitive and small businesses in particular will likely be hit hard. Even if just a handful of the TLDs are widely used for trademark infringement, the costs can pile up quickly and, with 1,500 TLDs being considered, the risk is very real.

It’s also likely that spammers will seize upon many of the new TLDs, much the same as they did with .biz and .info. The problem was so bad that Google once purged all or most .info domains from their index.

All of this amounts to confusion for the average user of the Web. Many are unaware of the impending changes and it’s unclear how they’ll react when the new TLDs come online. Will users start using .beauty or .love as their default the way they do .com now? That seems unlikely. It seems more likely that many will not understand what is going on. Many, for a long time at least, will be confused when asked to type in one of the new TLDs, almost reflexively putting in “.com” afterward.

This, in turn, is a big part of why .com is still so dominant and why it won’t go away any time soon.

Bottom Line

To be clear, there is at least a potential problem with .com becoming overcrowded. However, if opening up a handful of TLDs didn’t fix the problem, then opening up 1,500 TLDs (and putting them into the hands of various private companies), won’t fix it either and will likely just make many problems, including spam, trademark infringement and confusion, worse.

The issue is something of a chicken and egg problem. Legitimate webmasters don’t want to use new TLDs until users recognize them and treat them the same as .com. However, users won’t do that until the TLDs are populated with legitimate sites that they want to see.

In short, companies want to use TLDs users recognize but users won’t recognize a TLD until companies use it widely. It’s a nasty problem without an obvious solution.

However, simply throwing more TLDs at it is not the answer. It’s failed in the past and, most likely, will fail again. Considering that the Internet already doesn’t fully use all of the TLDs it has, the expansion seems like a huge risk with a lot of historical precedent against its success.

The post Why We Don’t Need More Domain Extensions appeared first on The Blog Herald.

A year later, it’s time to revisit that message, but in a different context.

With the recent NSA scandals, the attack on Tor network (widely suspected to be orchestrated by the U.S. government), and deep concerns about how government and private entities are cooperating to share user data, it’s clear isn’t just the government that needs a primer on how the Internet works.

The everyday user that does as well.

For most people, including many who grew up with the Internet, the Web seems almost magical. They click to visit a site or send an email and they get content or data from half a world away, nearly instantly.

But where most people take the time to understand at least the basics of how their car works, far fewer have taken the time to understand how the Internet works, even as they depend upon it more and more as part of their daily lives.

But like not knowing how a car works, ignorance can be dangerous and, also like a car, a little bit of understanding can go a long, long way.

How the Web is Like the Car

To go back to the comparison with the automobile, in many ways, the Internet evolved and great much like the car. When the Internet first started, it was slow, difficult to use and not very practical. It was more of a novelty than it was a serious tool.

It was similar to how, when automobiles first started, they would plod along at speeds below 10 miles per hour and require a mechanic to ride along at almost all times to keep it rolling. As such, it was mostly a toy for the wealthy or those who were extremely mechanically inclined.

But, as technology advanced, cars became faster, more dependable, easier to use and cheaper. As a result, more and more people began to purchase cars, better infrastructure was built for them and they quickly became the primary form of transportation in much of the world.

However, with the increased speed and dependance, the dangers also rose. From minor things such as breakdowns to more serious issues, such as accidents. Car problems went from being a inconvenience to, in many cases, a life-or-death matter.

But that increased seriousness did not lead to improved understanding of cars. For a time it remained fashionable and even acceptable to be completely clueless about automobiles and how they worked. Over time though, hard lessons began to pile up and more and more people started learning about at least the basics of cars, feeling it unsafe to drive without such knowledge.

The same is happening to the Internet. It started out as a slow, confusing novelty but has become faster, cheaper and easier than ever. With that improved access its use and importance has grown. Currently, we shop online, we bank online, we date online and the trend of growing importance is not slowing down. Yet, despite all of that, very few have a solid understanding of the mechanics of the Internet and how it works.

This makes it difficult for individuals to be secure online, to know how to troubleshoot many problems and participate productively in debates about Internet regulation. For most of us, the Internet is too valuable a part of our lives to not understand how it works and, for those who don’t know, the time to learn is now.

What You Need to Know

The good news is that you don’t really need to be a computer science graduate to understand how the Internet works.

Still, some of the concepts may seem to be complex, especially if you aren’t tech savvy, but the principles can be pretty easily understood and that is what is more important.

If you want to know the basics of how the Internet works, here are a few guides and concepts to get you started.

1. What is an IP Address: Understanding the number that is given to every computer connected to the Internet, whether it’s your router, the site your visiting or even your PC.
2. What is DNS: Understand how your computer converts a domain name (IE: blogherald.com) into an IP address and the security/reliability issues that the current method can raise.
3. How Data Travels on the Internet: Understanding that data does not travel in a straight line on the Web and passes through many hands on the way from A to B.
4. The Difference Between Secure and Insecure Connections: A basic understanding of how encryption works on the Internet and why it is important for sensitive data.
5. Basics Internet-Related Acronyms: A list of acronyms to refer back unfamiliar if you’re faced with unfamiliar terms.

While this might seem overwhelming, the guides linked above make it very easy to grasp the concepts. Even if you aren’t tech savvy and don’t understand all of the details, there are real-world analogues that can help you understand the concepts and improve your understanding of how the Internet works.

That understanding, as with a car or anything else that’s important in your life, can go a long way to keep you safe and productive.

Bottom Line

Right now, if you have no idea how this Web page appeared on your computer, it’s time to understand it. You need to know that your computer queried a DNS server to get the IP address, passed your request along countless routers, both on your ISPs network and others, and received a response much the same way.

When you understand how the Internet works, many more things become clear including why it is possible to spy on much of the Web, how some problems can be easily fixed (IE: Changing your DNS server when the one you’re using goes out or is slow) and just what politicians are trying to regulate.

Because, while politicians around the world definitely need to get a better handle on how the Web works, so does a majority of Internet users. For far too long, too many have been hitting “send” on their email without having any idea how it gets to where it’s going.

The time to end that confusion is now. Something as important as the Internet should not remain a mystery to those who use it.

The post It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How the Internet Works appeared first on The Blog Herald.

However, whenever a major scandal like this emerges, it inevitably has unintended consequences on other debates and discussions. The Web community, in the most broad sense of the word, tends to be laser-focused on whatever issue is most prevalent on any given day.

Issues that aren’t so prevalent, however, take a back seat.

One such example of this is the copyright debates. Though copyright became a hot button issue in early 2012 with the SOPA/PIPA protests, it had been a focal point of the tech community for a long time before.

Today though, much of that attention is gone and many of the tech sites and authors that focused heavily, or even almost exclusively, on copyright issues have shifted their aim to government-related issues. This move has quieted an online debate that is still very much active in courtrooms and legislatures all over the world and one that could easily play an important role in the PRISM/NSA discussion.

Unfortunately though, the reasons for this are straightforward and there isn’t much that can be done about it, at least not without breaking the laws of physics.

The Shrinking Spotlight

Techdirt is a tech site that, historically, has focused heavily on copyright and intellectual-property (IP) related matters. Before the NSA scandals, its home page was dominated by IP-related news, taking up the lion’s share of new content.

However, that changed drastically after the NSA scandal. As of this writing late in the evening on July 23, six of the ten stories on the home page focus on or discuss the NSA directly, one on government transparency, one on patent law and just one on copyright. The tenth story is a round up post with various links.

That trend continues for at least the next three pages, with government transparency/spying stories outnumber intellectual property stories handily.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), has traditionally been one of the most active organizations on copyright matters, tracking, reporting on and even offering legal services in important cases. However, more recently, it’s Deeplinks blog has been focused much more heavily on government spying issues, with six stories about government surveillance in the first two pages of the site and only one about copyright

Though these are only small samples and by no means a thorough content analysis, both of these sites are considered major voices in the copyright debates, whether you agree with them or not, and they both have turned much of their attention away from the subject.

This would be understandable if there weren’t a great deal of copyright news going on, but news has not slowed down terrible. In Malaysia there are negotiations regarding the secretive and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty (TPP), blocking of infringing sites (similar to SOPA/PIPA) is ramping up in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, artist outcry over royalties paid by streaming music services (including Pandora and Spotify) have reached a fever pitch and there are even hearings in Congress about a potential overhaul of U.S. copyright law.

To be clear, tech sites, including the ones above, are covering these stories. However, these stories aren’t receiving as much attention as they once did. Simply put, copyright is not the hot-button issue it was just a few months ago and it isn’t written about as much because it’s not the topic that gets traffic, comments and social media interaction.

The Internet, for now at least, has found a new outrage and that has made the copyright debates unusually quiet.

The Reason for the Calm

The reason for this, and the reason the Internet seems to be laser-focused on one issue at a time, is because attention, outrage and motivation are all finite resources. The amount of time in a day a person has to read, care about or study an issue that doesn’t relate to their immediate survival is limited.

People, naturally, try to prioritize the issues they care about and part of that prioritization is based on what is seen as most important. However, it’s also a part of what is most interesting and novel. To that regard, the PRISM issue is both serious, novel and interesting making it a natural target heightened interest.

In short, people are more interested in the PRISM scandal because it is more interesting, at least right now.

The concern though is that the copyright issues (and other issues on the back burner) don’t go away, the conversation just becomes more directed by people who are engaging in the dialog as part of their job. In the case of the copyright debate this includes content creators, lawyers, people who work for services involved in copyright (both legitimate and infringing), law enforcement and government officials in the field.

All of those groups are continuing to be very active in the conversation, it’s the “normal” follower of tech, someone for whom copyright is only one of many concerns, who is less involved.

However, without those voices, the conversation inevitably changes its tone as the broader public, though less involved directly can be an extremely loud force, as the SOPA/PIPA protests proved.

Bottom Line

When media and public attention is pulled away from a subject, even partially, the nature of the conversation around it changes. The presence of fewer voices and less attention changes the dynamics of a conversation.

However, if there is one thing that everyone in the copyright debate is acutely aware of, it’s that the issue can come to the forefront of public interest once again at any time. With the SOPA/PIPA protests, the interest in copyright, briefly, went outside even the tech community and into a much larger community of casual Internet users. This helped give even more volume to that side.

Just because the focus has shifted for now as bigger, newer topics have come up, doesn’t mean it can’t return. In the meantime though, a lot of important things will be happening in the copyright field that won’t be getting a large amount of press coverage.

As news sites respond to what is attracting user interest, copyright will wax and wane on their front pages, but the conversation will always be going on, whether or not the public is participating in a major way.

The post How the PRISM Scandal Changed the Copyright Debate appeared first on The Blog Herald.

It’s been just over a month since The Guardian broke the story about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive data collection program known as PRISM. The fervor has not died down and additional revelations about how the program works and similar systems existing in other countries have only stoked the flames

That anger has culminated in both “Restore the Fourth” rallies across the U.S., outrange online and a great deal of mockery as people turn to humor to best express their feelings. The nation, and indeed the world, has also turned its attention to the flight of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who originally leaked information about the program to the media.

But in the midst of the anger, lawsuits and questions, a larger conversation is taking place, one that revolves around privacy online, how much information we put out about ourselves on the Web and who has access to it.

That is because, while the Internet has certainly made our lives more convenient, it has also made them more trackable. In our bid to communicate better and easier, we put out so much information about ourselves, both intentionally and unintentionally, that the discovery of the NSA’s program may be as much a moment of reevaluation of our own practices as well as our government.

After all, for the government to collect the information it does, someone else has to have it first and the government is not the only entity with a vested interest in tracking you and monitoring your activities.

Staying Private in a Very Public Place

If the Internet were a physical place, it would easily be the most public place that has ever existed. It’s a place where, theoretically, your every action is visible to the entire world, akin to the Roman forum but on a global scale.

However, we’ve tried to carve out private areas in that very public place. Our private emails, our private chats, even our private phone calls, etc. For the most part, we’ve done a good job keeping other members of the public at bay. For example, I can’t trivially access your emails without first gaining unauthorized (and illegal) access to your account.

But it’s easy to forget that all parts of the Internet, the public and the private, travel across the same infrastructure and pass through the same companies’ hands.

Though your data might be safe from your family and friends, it’s not safe from those who have access to the infrastructure upon which the Internet is built. This includes the companies, government agencies and even individuals who can save and look at that data.

On some level, we have long known this. Few, for example, would send a personal email over their corporate servers because they know the company has access to it. However, that actually applies to all of the Internet. After all, someone owns every connection, whether it’s a private company a non-profit organization or a government agency.

In short, every step the data you send online takes, someone owns the line it is carried on and, while historically that has not been a serious problem, as the NSA scandal shows, it can easily become one.

Of those types of scary things, there is little more frightening than the law itself and how it can impact our daily lives.

As bloggers, we’re even more vulnerable than most when it comes to legal issues because, in addition to the usual spate of laws one has to follow day-to-day, we have the responsibilities of dealing with mass media law as well. Something, previously, few outside of the TV, radio, print and related industries had to deal with.

So, if you want some scary thoughts to give you something to ponder, here are five of the scariest legal realities and what they mean for you.

5. You Are, Most Likely, a Public Figure

By blogging and injecting yourself in a public discourse, you are a public figure and are treated the same, legally at least, as the biggest celebrity or a politician.

While that may not seem like a big deal, legally it makes it much more difficult to prove a libel case as you have to show that someone who said something untrue and harmful about you did so with actual malice, meaning they were wrong intentionally, and you have a limited claim to a right of privacy.

Courts have already ruled that those who interject themselves into Internet debates, including via blogging, are public figures and at least one person has had their case thrown out on these grounds.

In short, just by blogging, your privacy and defamation rights are greatly limited.

4. You Can’t Hide

Anonymity online is, more or less, nonexistant. Breaking through any veil of anonymity is, more or less, just a matter of the effort it takes to pierce it. While casual anonymity may fool your mother and your coworkers, it won’t fool your government who can get information from your host, your ISP and others involved in your online activities.

While you can take more drastic steps, such as proxies, to help avoid detection from law enforcement and those who might want to sue you, those aren’t perfect in many cases. To make matters worse, even if you do manage to find a perfect solution, you have to be perfect with every interaction you have online to avoid getting caught, something even the best fail to do.

Legally, it’s generally best to assume you can’t hide and that your identity can always be found out if there’s enough interest in discovering it.

3. You Can’t Truly Delete Anything Online

There’s an old saying that you can’t delete anything on the Web and, for the most part, it’s true. As long as there is interest in something, it is going toi be spread far and wide across the Web and impossible to kill. Laws about copyright, obscenity, defamation, etc. give you legal recourses but, as a practical matter, it can’t be destroyed completely.

But even if something doesn’t seem to generate a great deal of interest, it still exists after you delete it. Remember that bad Facebook photo that you took down a few days later? Facebook still has a copy of it.. As such, if anyone were to subpoena your account they would see what you posted.

To be clear, Facebook is not alone in this, most sites that host data from users hang on to deleted content for at least a certain period of time, usually many months. Some are better than others, but you can never assume the delete key actually deletes anything.

2. You Don’t “Own” Most of What You Post

Read the terms of service of just about any host, social networking site, forum, etc. and you’ll learn quickly that they are laying some pretty heavy claims to you content. TwitPic, for example, recently drew a lot of fire over its plan to sell some of its user-generated content and editing the TOS so it could do so.

However, even when a TOS isn’t being over the top with its claims, as a sheer matter of practicality you have to grant any host you put your content on a broad license to display and transform your work just so that their service can function.

In short, even the best host in this area walks away with a lot of rights to your work.

If you want exclusive rights or to give an exclusive license to someone else, you’re better off not posting your work on the Web or, at the very least, have an understanding how to terminate the terms other sites make you agree to.

1. Anyone Can Sue You for Anything, Anywhere

When we wrangle with legal questions such as “Is this libel?” or “Is this copyright infringement?” we are usually asking if a person could win a lawsuit based on this situation. What we never ask is if someone CAN sue. The reason is that you can sue anyone, anytime for just about anything.

Think about it. I could, theoretically at least, sue you tomorrow for destruction of my property, alleging that you keyed my car or broke my window. It doesn’t really matter that you were or were not anywhere near my house, city, state or even within my country.

I won’t win, but I can force you to go through the hassle and expense to respond and get the case dismissed. While such lawsuits are often considered abusive, the recourse is often limited.

While this is true for anyone, this is especially scary for bloggers as you are of potential interest to people all over the world. Want to get sued in Australia for libel? What about being sued in the U.S. if you’re a UK company? While both of these lawsuits were ridiculous and resolved in favor of the defendant, they still had to endure the hassle and expense of dealing with the case.

All it takes is one person with an axe to grind and you can be in a strange court being sued for almost anything.

Bottom Line

Should these legal realities scare you away from blogging? No. But they should definitely make you more cautious and more aware of the realities that you face as a blogger publishing your works on the Web.

The simple truth is that the Web is a scary place legally and it is best to be careful what you do. Though there is no way you can be completely legally safe online, if you are aware of the situation, act with caution and make smart decisions, you can minimize the risk greatly.

In short, don’t let fear scare you away, but let it guide you and keep you safer. That’s the best use for it.

The post 5 Legal Nightmares to Scare you on Halloween appeared first on The Blog Herald.

With that in mind, there is simply way too much to ever cover in one article. However, here is a brief overview of some of the facts that you need to know in order to stay safe online. Obviously, this won’t be in-depth and, if you want more information you should consult an attorney (or at least do further research).

But this should give you an idea of what you should be looking for and what questions you should be asking.

Also, it’s worth noting that these facts are based on U.S. law, if you are outside the country, obviously the situation is going to change.

On that note, here’s a look at 20 legal facts every blogger needs to know:

General

1. The Web is world-wide. As such, your content will reach virtually every country and every jurisdiction in the world. As mentioned above, the facts below are based on U.S. law but you always have to remember that what is legal in one area may not be legal in another. That can, in some situations, bite you.
2. As a blogger, you are posting works to a public forum. Even if only a few people read your site, the law treats it largely the same as if you had screamed everything in a crowded square or printed it on the cover of your local newspaper.
3. As a blogger, you are responsible legally for what you post and, posting anonymous or pseudonymously is not a guarantee against legal consequences. Such steps can help avoid other consequences, such as professional ones, but generally not legal ones.

Copyright

4. Copyright protects works of creative authorship and is a collection of rights over those works. Those rights include the right to make copies, the right publicly display/perform the work and the right to make derivative works. Doing any of those things to a copyrighted work without permission is an infringement.
5. Copyright is given either to the author of the work, or their employer if they they are creating the work for their job (Note: Contract work does not always transfer copyright), the moment that work is fixed into a tangible medium of expression. No further action is required for a work to be protected, though copyright registration is required to sue and has other benefits.
6. By default, copyright blocks uses of a work. If you want to give broad permission to use a particular work use a Creative Commons License to let others know the terms they can use it under. Likewise, if you are looking for a work that you can use, seek out one with a CC license or otherwise made available for reuse.
7. The current term for copyright in the U.S. is for the life of the author plus 70 years for individuals or 95 years for works of corporate authorship. Once that term expires, the work lapses into the public domain, where it has no copyright protection.
8. Fair use is an exemption to copyright that allows others to use copyrighted works without permission for certain limited purposes. However, there are no bright line rules when it comes to fair use. Instead, fair use is decided on a four-factor test that looks at each case in context. The only way to know for certain if a use is fair or not is through the courts.
9. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it relatively easy to get any infringing copies of your work removed from sites hosted in the U.S. Similar laws also work in the EU, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries.

Defamation

10. Defamation is the communication of any statement, presented or implied to be true, that is false and puts a person, business or other entity in a negative light, falsely harming their reputation.
11. Slander is any defamation presented in a transitory medium, usually spoken word. Libel is anything that is printed, published or otherwise put into a fixed form. Most defamation online is libel, not slander unless it is not not being saved as it is being said.
12. For the purpose of defamation, it doesn’t matter if it is communicated to one party or a million. Both meet the criteria as long as someone’s reputation is falsely hurt.
13. Truth is an absolute defense against a defamation claim but it must be a verifiable fact. Likewise, opinions are not libelous but they must be actual opinions, not statements falsely labeled as opinions.
14. Libel law is largely set on the state level, meaning that what is libelous in one area might not be in another as there are many inconsistencies.

Trademark

15. A trademark is a word, symbol, phrase, sound or almost anything used to identify a business or their goods/services. Trademarks do not have to be registered to be protected, but registration can and does help. As such, if you use your site for business, you likely have some level of trademark protection in your name.
16. Trademark law is designed to prevent confusion in the marketplace. This means using a mark in a way that implies you have a relationship with the business that doesn’t exist is likely trademark infringing. The same goes for using a confusingly similar mark.
17. Though trademark protects things copyright can’t, such as names and phrases, that protection is limited to uses that cause confusion. You’re free to talk about a business.

Privacy

18. There are four different types of privacy torts: Intrusion upon seclusion, misappropriation of image, publication of private facts and false light, the latter of which is similar to defamation.
19. Once a fact has been made public, it’s considered in the public domain and repeating it is not the same as making it public. As such, any information you put on your blog, Facebook, etc. is considered public and can be repeated by others.
20. Privacy laws, as with defamation, vary from state to state, be sure to look up your local laws.

Bottom Line

Obviously, this list barely skims the surface of these topics and, if you have a legal question about any of these areas you need to either consult with an attorney or, at the very least, do a lot more research on your own.

The goal of this is more about telling you the types of things you should know and relaying some of the key pieces of legal information that every blogger absolutely must know in order to be safe online.

In short, though there’s much more to learn, these are some of the key facts you have to know and they should serve as a great place to start for learning more.

The post 20 Legal Facts Every Blogger Should Know appeared first on The Blog Herald.

But while that’s definitely true, it’s also not quite the full story. In the U.S., though copyright is granted in a work the moment its fixed into a tangible medium of expression, one does not have all of the tools needed to enforce that copyright until they take an additional step.

That additional step is timely registration with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) and for many bloggers, both in the U.S. and abroad, it’s a both a good idea and an important step you can take to protect your work.

If you’re wondering why you should register, there are actually many but here are six of the big reasons to get you started (PDF).

1. The Ability to File a Lawsuit

There’s something of an odd catch-22 in U.S. copyright law that says, while your work is protected under copyright from the moment of creation, if you actually want to sue someone and enforce that right you first have to register your work with the USCO.

The reason for this is actually one of jurisdiction. In the U.S., only Federal courts can hear copyright cases and Federal courts only have jurisdiction over copyright matters if there is a registration on file.

Is it convoluted and somewhat unfair? Yes. But it’s the law as it is written right now.

2. The Chance to Collect Full Damages

Copyright law, in the U.S., offers two kinds of damages that one can collect: Actual and statutory.

Actual damages are the greater of what the infringer gained or the infringed lost. Statutory damages range between $750 and $150,000 per infringement and are regardless of the money earned or lost in the infringing act (though those factors are weighed in determining the damages).

However, in order to obtain statutory damages you need to either register your work before the infringement takes place or within 3 months of publication.

Obviously, with a timely copyright registration, the same infringement can mean a lot more in damages.

3. The Ability to Collect Attorney’s Fees

The same as timely registration helps you collect full damages on an infringement, it also lets you collect attorney’s fees on an infringement as well.

While this might not seem like a big deal, it’s important to note that, copyright, as a Federal issue, is expensive to litigate and most attorneys won’t even look at a copyright case unless there is some assurance they can collect their fees. This means either a very large retainer or, ideally, a timely registration and a good chance at success.

In many copyright cases, attorney’s fees actually make up a large portion of the award so having this available to you not only means you’ll more likely find someone to take your case, but it can save you many thousands of dollars in costs.

4. Prima Facie Evidence of Authorship

If someone takes your creation and claims it as their own, it can be difficult to prove who owned the work and when. However, a timely copyright registration provides what is known as “prima facie” evidence of authorship.

What this means is that the burden of proof is on the other party to prove that the registration is wrong, not on you to prove that it is correct. This can be very powerful as proving you own something you created is difficult enough but proving you created something you didn’t is nearly impossible.

In short, it makes proving your case much, much easier and lets you skip several steps in staking your claim should things head to court.

5. Public Record of Claim and Authorship

All copyright registrations are stored in a public database that allows others to look up information about the work. This way, if anyone has any questions about who created a work, who the copyright holder is and where to get permission to use the work, the information is readily available.

This can be very useful down the road if others want to use your work but your site is no longer operational. This is especially important with the orphan works issue that is being so hotly debated in the U.S. and EU, as it will, most likely, prevent your work from becoming an orphan and available for use should such legislation pass.

6. A Big Stick to Wield

Finally, even if you don’t ever plan on suing for copyright infringement, a timely copyright registration gives you a lot of weight to throw around in a copyright dispute.

If someone does take your work and you want them to stop, you can easily point to your registration filing and your offer your registration number to let them know that A) You take your copyright very seriously and B) You have the ability to sue them for a large amount of money.

Infringers are simply more cooperative when they are staring at a serious legal threat than one they know to be idle, making them much more cooperative. The same can be said for hosts and for others who you may have to turn to for help in enforcing your copyright.

Bottom Line

For most bloggers, registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office makes a lot of sense. It only costs $35 per registration and only needs to be done once every 3 months. That means $140 per year buys you a great deal of peace of mind when it comes to your work being protected.

Even if you’re not in the U.S., it probably is not a bad idea. Not only does a U.S. registration provide solid proof in other countries, especially most other countries don’t have a formal registration system, but you also can’t predict where your work will be infringed. Though you can sue in the U.S. without a registration if you are from outside the country, you still can’t collect full damages and you miss out on many other benefits as well.

As such, a USCO registration is a sensible act for just about everyone, regardless of where they are and how their content is being used.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post 6 Reasons to Register Your Site with the U.S. Copyright Office appeared first on The Blog Herald.

But this doesn’t mean everyone is perfect either. Most sites, at the very least, bend the law and sometimes outright break it.

This isn’t because they are run by bad people but because of the nature of the law itself. Sometimes it’s poorly-written law that is almost impossible to not break (at least technically) and sometimes it’s lack of knowledge about the law itself.

So what are some of the ways you’re probably breaking the law online? There are too many to choose from but here are five you should definitely take a look at.

1. Copyright Infringement

Most legal experts agree that copyright law is a pervasive and confusing law that is almost impossible to not run afoul of at least some. Couple that with widespread misinformation and ignorance about the law and you have a recipe by which nearly every blogger, even the ones who aren’t spammers and scrapers, probably have done something infringing.

A common problem area is images on your site. If you use Google Image Search to find photos and artwork to go with your posts, you’re almost certainly infringing, unless you only look at correctly licensed works. However, even if you are careful to only look for licensed stock photos or Creative Commons images, you may still run afoul of the law if the person who offered it to you either misled you or didn’t verify who owned it.

The Impact: Sites that intentionally infringe copyright get shut down all the time, those who do so accidentally rarely face any serious consequences. Generally, the application of the law does a good job of separating the intentionally infringing from the accidental cases. Still, it’s important to try and make sure you’re on the right side as much as possible as it only takes one angry copyright holder to ruin your site.

2. TOS Violations

If you have a website, that means you have a hosting provider and, as such, you agreed to a terms of service to set up your account.

If you actually read through your TOS, which few people do, there’s a lot of stuff in there that might seem insane. You’ll find that your “unlimited account” is very much limited, that there are certain types of content you can’t host and certain kinds of apps you can’t run.

What those limitations are varies from company to company, but considering that those rules bar copyright infringing materials (see above), defamatory speech and, possibly, otherwise legal adult content, there’s a very good chance you’ve broken your TOS at least a few times.

The Impact: Realistically, minor TOS violations only seem to come up when the host is unhappy about something else. If your site is using a lot of bandwidth or you’ve been a problem customer with billing, these issues are often raised as an excuse to ditch you as a customer.

3. False WHOIS Information

When you signed up for your domain, you were asked to provide information for the Whois database. This is because ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain name system requires it from all registrars (Godady, Network Solutions, etc.) to obtain information from those who register domains.

Though some offer domain privacy services, which do appear to be allowed under the law (as long as the contact information reaches you) many people don’t do that and then either falsify information to avoid leaking personal info or just enter false info for data they don’t have (IE: Fax number).

This is a violation of the terms of your domain and could, at least theoretically, result in your domain being revoked.

The Impact: ICANN has a way you can report false Whois information. However, few people use it unless there is some preexisting reason to want a site shut down, such as illegal content. Very few domains are actually revoked on these grounds, though it does happen.

4. Privacy Laws

Though you probably don’t really care what your visitors are doing after they leave your site and have no interest in tracking them, what about your analytics plugins? You social networking tools? Your plugins?

Your site most likely leaves cookies in your visitor’s browser. This is for everything from site customization to statistics tracking. However, rules about when and how you can track people vary and recent rules in the EU require informed consent before the use of such cookies.

However, don’t feel too bad about violating the law in this area, some 99% of UK government sites are in violation too.

The Impact: Enforcement of this law is almost nil and it’s unclear what the effective punishment would be if there were an effort to enforce it, especially for webmasters outside of the EU. Still, probably wise to stick to the mainstream analytics and social networking providers, though even that isn’t always safe.

5. Adult/Offensive/Hate Content

Most people think that, as long as they avoid pornographic content, they probably are safe from a content standpoint. While that’s probably fairly safe in the U.S., what about other countries?

Obscenity laws vary wildly from country to country. There’s even blasphemy and/or “religious insult” laws on the books of many nations including Greece, Germany and even Canada, just to name a few.

What’s seen as perfectly reasonable speech in one country is often considered a criminal violation in another and it’s not always nations with overly oppressive regimes and kings who can’t be insulted.

The Impact: In most “western” nations these laws are rarely enforced and they would only realistically impact you if you visited these other nations. That being said, many sites are banned and blocked on these grounds so people in nations where your speech is illegal may not be able to view your site.

Bottom Line

So there you have it, five ways that any law-abiding Web citizen can be, and likely is, breaking the law. Sure these might be technicalities but they all have one thing in common: At least one blogger has been sued, arrested or otherwise punished for breaking these rules without realizing it.

So, it’s important to be aware of these issues and to do your best to avoid them.

That being said, they might not be completely avoidable so, while you should do your best, you can’t let yourself get broken up over every minor misstep. With so many conflicting laws on this planet, you’ve certainly broken a few and, in truth, you probably didn’t even realize you had done it.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post 5 Ways Your Site is Probably Breaking the Law Right Now appeared first on The Blog Herald.

This move stems directly from the rise in both smartphones, which often include high-definition video/still cameras, as well as other portable recording and Internet-connected devices. From Flip cameras to laptops, you can run an entire multimedia empire without ever sitting in an office.

However, all of this mobility comes with it a series of new legal questions and issues that desktop-only bloggers don’t have to face. When you’re recording audio and video on the street, you have some additional concerns to worry about.

Fortunately, they are legal questions that you can easily address and deal with, so long as you’re aware of them and take steps to avoid them before you step out the door.

1. Privacy

When it comes to mobile blogging, privacy is probably the most obvious of the potential legal issues. After all, by the very nature of recording media on the go, you’re likely going to be recording other people, many of whom may not want to be recorded or have their activities plastered all over the Web.

Fortunately, this is not a new issue for traditional media, which literally has centuries of history photographing and videotaping people for news reports. The legal boundaries are fairly well set.

The safest thing to do is ask permission before you videotape, photograph or otherwise record someone for the purpose of posting online. If you can record this permission, or even better get it in writing, there should be no privacy issues at all.

However, that’s not always practical. In those situations, it’s important to only record people who are in public and have no reasonable expectation of privacy. A man unicycling down the street has no reasonable expectation of privacy, but one in a bathroom stall does. Record the latter and it becomes an issue of intrusion upon seclusion, an invasion of privacy tort.

Anything you record on a public place from people already a public place should be more than fine from a privacy standpoint. However, many establishments have their own policies regarding videotaping and photographing, which is actually a separate issue from privacy matters.

2. Copyright (Other People’s Rights)

Once you start shooting pictures or recording film “in the wild” you’re going to find yourself interacting with other copyrighted works almost constantly.

As an experiment, go to a major city street and look around. Many of the posters, statutes and even some of the buildings themselves are copyright-protected. If a radio is playing (either from a car or a building), it’s playing copyrighted music and there are likely televisions within eyesight that are playing copyrighted content.

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry too hard about all of these issues. Incidental inclusion of copyrighted works is generally considered to be a fair use. So that poster that happens to be in the background of a photo you’re shooting or that song snippet that you caught a few seconds of while shooting a video are almost certain fair uses.

However, this doesn’t mean you can deliberately record or reproduce copyrighted works on the street either. For example, if you record a busker playing a song on a street corner, even though you won’t be infringing his rights (privacy or copyright), you may be infringing the rights of the song writer if it’s a cover. Likewise if you take a photo of a statute or a piece of artwork without much else in it, you could be infringing the rights of that artist.

In short, you have to be careful what you record but you don’t obsess over removing every single copyrighted work from what you capture.

3. Copyright (Your Rights)

On the other side of the coin, you also have to worry more about your rights when it comes to copyright. There are two reasons for this:

1. Mobile media tends to be passed through third-party services, such as TwitPic, which often come with usage terms that take away more rights from you than other services and have caused a lot of controversy in recent months.
2. Mobile uploads are shared much more widely as they are used more regularly in social media, meaning that anything you upload or post is much more likely to be passed around than a regular blog post. While much of this sharing comes with attribution, it often times comes without any.

To deal with the first problem, simply choose services with reasonable terms of service. That’s no different than with non-mobile services. For the second, consider using recording software that automatically adds watermarks to your outgoing photos and videos the ensure attribution follows the work.

4. Trespass and “No Photography” Issues

One of the thornier issues those recording video and audio on the go have to deal with is the issue of trespassing and various “No Photography Allowed” issues.

The problem is simple, there are a slew of places where photography and video recording is expressly banned and the list is growing.

This area is thorny because a lot of the regulations are decided on a state or even local level, but generally any business owner has the right to post a sign barring photography, either by using a sign or telling you in person. If you violate that right, generally, it is considered trespassing.

There are also other places you may not be able to take photos, including, in at least some cases, train stations, airports, etc. depending on the rules. Much of this stems from anti-terrorism legislation passed since 9/11.

Your best bet is to ask permission before shooting photos or video on private property, even if it is a public place.

5. Libel and False Light Issues

Obviously defamation, in particular libel, remains just as big of an issue for mobile bloggers as it does for those working from their office. You can’t knowingly make false statements about others that harm their reputation without risking a lawsuit.

However, it’s important to remember that, while the camera doesn’t lie, it can mislead. For example, if you take a picture of someone who is walking past a protest group and make it appear they are a member of it or if you capture them in a pose that makes them appear to be doing something they are not, it could lead to problems.

These problems include both libel and false light claims. Though the two have a lot of overlap and neither are recognized in all jurisdictions, the typical distinction is that libel deals with a person’s public reputation and false light with emotional injury.

It’s important to be careful how you shoot other people, even with their permission in a public space, to be sure that you don’t accidentally libel them. Though, generally, you can’t accidentally libel someone (unless it can be considered negligence) you could still have a legal headache on your hands.

Since we’re in the era of digital photography, if possible, you may want to show your subject the photo or video before publishing it. However, the important thing is to make sure your photos and videos don’t accidentally imply something about your subject you didn’t intend. Otherwise, you could find yourself with a legal headache.

Bottom Line

In the end, what it all comes down to is this: Be careful when you’re out in the wild.

Whether you’re tweeting, shooting video or taking pictures in public, be wary of the legal risks you expose yourself to and make sure to take steps to avoid them. It may be something of a wet blanket on the excitement of mobile media, but it is much better than a lawsuit or even a threat of one.

Be smart about the content you create and you’ll be safer and more productive with your mobile blogging.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post 5 Legal Problems Raised By Mobile Blogging appeared first on The Blog Herald.

However, privacy is a very thorny issue, even more so than most areas of law online. The reason is that much of what we think of as privacy law is actually decided on a state level, meaning in the U.S. alone there is effectively 50 interpretations of privacy law. This says nothing, obviously, about the international implications.

But privacy issue for bloggers is about to get a lot thornier than even that, or at least a lot more visible. At its F8 conference, Facebook announced a new API that is going to make it easier for people to share more things with their Facebook friends, including sharing things that they did not decide, at least on an individual level, to put out there.

Combine this with its already-promised new buttons for websites, including “read”. “watch”, etc. and it’s easy to see how the issue of privacy will likely be brought into focus again for bloggers.

So, no matter what you think of the new Facebook features and tools, it’s important to be aware of the potential legal and ethical implications of using them and, to that end, it’s worth taking another look at privacy.

The Basics of Privacy

Though, as mentioned above, the rules vary from state to state, one thing that is more or less true is that once a person makes a fact public, no matter how embarrassing this fact is, others are able to report on it and repeat it without fear of being liable for an invasion of privacy. In short, once a person puts information about themselves out there, it is out there.

Beyond that, privacy law generally follows a set of guidelines where one can be held liable for doing the following things:

1. Publicly disclosing
2. a private fact
3. that is offensive to a reasonable person and
4. is not a matter of “legitimate” public concern

Specifically, this is the law in California but it’s a good template for most other jurisdictions as well.

The sentence is broken apart that way to illustrate the four elements that have to be met. Let’s break them apart in more detail here:

1. Public Disclosure: The fact must be given to a third party. However, it doesn’t have to be many people or even more than one, just proof that someone else read the information.
2. A Private Fact: The fact must be private, meaning of a personal nature and not previously disclosed. Basically, this can be almost anything reasonably considered personal.
3. That is Offensive to a Reasonable Person: The fact must put the person in a negative light. Saying, for example, someone donated a large sum of money to starving orphans wouldn’t be offensive but saying they suffer a severe mental disorder would be.
4. Not a Legitimate Public concern: Finally, the fact can’t be of any legitimate public concern. For example, outing a Congressman for philandering is a matter of public interest, but doing the same for a private citizen probably isn’t.

The question is clear though, what does all of this have to do with Facebook? It seems almost inevitable that the new Facebook tools will cause at least some people to have private information about themselves revealed and considering bloggers, through the tools Facebook will provide, may be a part of that, it sets the stage for a privacy showdown. in the near future.

The Landscape for Bloggers

The good news is that, as a blogger, your risk of being sued, especially successfully, for a privacy violation due to one of the new Facebook tools is seemingly very low. The reason is that the user will have to authorize your site to send out the updates.

Even if they don’t realize fully what they’re doing or make a mistake that reveals information, that permission should serve as enough protection to you, and indeed Facebook.

This is especially true considering Facebook’s legendary Terms of Use and other user agreements that shield it from virtually all liability.

There might be issues if a site did something deceptive that would cause someone to reveal information they didn’t intend, but Facebook’s permissions screen seems as if it would make that difficult.

Still, as long as bloggers stay above the boards with this, its unlikely there will be any significant privacy issues, at least legally. The real concern would be a backlash from the community against the tools and it seems that there is already at least some such backlash brewing.

The Bigger Privacy Concern

Unfortunately, the bigger privacy concern actually comes from the opposite side, the side of being a user.

Though granularly giving approval for everything you shared might have been a pain, it also prevented some embarrassing moments. However, with the upcoming changes, it’s at least possible that you’ll reveal information about yourself that you didn’t intend simply because updates are going out without any action on your part and for relatively mundane things.

However, legally at least, it will still be seen as you putting the information on the Web. After all, you agreed to Facebook’s terms and you approved the app to do exactly what it said. As such, you’re responsible for what it puts out there.

Worse still, if you do put something out there, since you placed made it public, you can’t legally prevent others from spreading it further. If you don’t want the world to know about your guilty pleasure bands or your obsession for a bizarre TV show, you need to be careful what you agree to.

Once that personal information is out there by your hand, it is gone and you can’t get your privacy regarding it back.

Bottom Line

The best advice I can give anyone regarding these new tools is to take it slow. Rushing in to share everything is a stupid move and, likewise, a webmaster who rushes to embrace the new tools wholeheartedly my find themselves not at the cutting edge of a movement, but at the stabbing edge of a pitchfork.

Go slow, find your comfort zone and let the world find theirs. Then you can decide what’s the best way to use these tools with your site as well as within your life.

This is very much uncharted territory, even for Facebook, so only the most foolish would dare to rush in…

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post Blogging, Privacy and the New Facebook appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Though copyright, by design, protects all forms of content equally, how it is enforced and who is doing the enforcing changes drastically with the medium. This means that bloggers who might take some of their habits, both good and bad, from text into video, might be in for a bit of culture shock.

So what are some of the copyright changes a blogger should expect when going from text to video? Here’s just a small sample of some of the ways the two media are very different from both a practical and a legal perspective.

1. Less Infringement of Blogger Content

First, the good news. Bloggers who make the switch to video or start creating video for their site will likely find that their videos are stolen a lot less than their written works.

There are many reasons for this. First, it’s generally much easier to embed a video rather than download it and re-upload it to a new account. Second, fewer people have the ability to edit and manipulate video content productively, reducing the number of potential plagiarists significantly.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is that there is little SEO benefit from taking video content, thus reducing the gain someone would get from scraping and republishing your video content wholesale.

In short, people just play nicer with video content and, though there is definitely some infringement of videos, especially from more popular series, most bloggers won’t have to worry about it as much.

2. Greater Difficulty Tracking Content

The bad news is that, while you certainly will likely see less plagiarism and infringement of your work, it’s also much harder to track. The tools for tracking video content are, more or less, only available to the largest content producers and are well out of the hands of the average blogger.

As such, if there is infringement of your work, other than searching for the title of it and hoping to find all uses of it, there isn’t much that you can do.

In short, if you’re the type of person who likes to be aware of how your content is being used, the Web just isn’t as friendly of a place for video content, even if it is less likely to be misused.

3. More Takedowns Coming Your Way

So, while the news is mixed when it comes to other people using and misusing your content, it’s a similar story when it comes to how you interact with the content of others.

Those aforementioned tools that the major content producers have basically guarnatee that they are aware almost instantly of any use of their work you make. Whether it’s a song playing in the background, a video clip for a review or anything in between.

The tools are sensitive enough so that even a few seconds of a song can trip them and the major content producers are very active in seeking this content out and getting it removed from the various video hosting sites, especially YouTube.

Unfortunately, the aggressiveness of this enforcement combined with the sensitivity of some of the tools means that not all of the takedown notices are accurate or fair. So, as a video blogger, you need to be aware of your rights, make sure that you use content within the bounds of fair use and, if needed, stand up for your rights.

In most cases, especially those involving more automated takedowns, this is very easy to do and doesn’t require the filing of a full counter-notice. However, you still want to be very sure of your position before you move forward.

In the end, as a video blogger you are much more likely to find yourself on the wrong end of a takedown notice, rightly or wrongly, but if it does happen it’s more often than not just a minor nuisance, as long as it doesn’t happen too often.

4. Better Partnership Opportunities

But as scary as the prospect of facing a takedown is, video content also has greater opportunities for using content legally. YouTube has been aggressively signing deals with record labels and songwriters in a bid to make the use of their music available to its members, all the while sharing revenue with artists, authors and labels.

Where newspapers, book publishers, etc. make it more difficult to obtain licenses to use their content, music is becoming much more available and video content, most likely, isn’t far behind.

On top of that, there’s already a very large library of Creative Commons and other freely-licensed music and video available to use.

In short, with video, it may actually be easier to remix and repurpose other content legally and without having to rely upon a fair use defense.

Bottom Line

In short, with video the news is some good and some bad. You’ll likely find your content is misused less but you’ll have a harder time tracking it when it is. Likewise, you’ll find that there is more aggressive copyright enforcement by the major players in this area, but also that they are more open to licensing agreements that let you use their work for free.

The result of this is simple, the copyright climate for video is not necessarily better or worse than the one for text, but merely different.

Still, it is important to learn how to navigate this new climate so that you can both get the best use of the content you create and to stay out of trouble.

Otherwise, you may be in for a very nasty piece of culture shock that could cost you all of your hard work.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post How Video is Changing Copyright for Bloggers appeared first on The Blog Herald.

However, more and more bloggers are beginning to wade into this territory. These include sex blogs that openly discuss mature issues, photographers and artists whose work often pushes boundaries in this area and even, on some occasions, unrelated blogs that discuss tangential issues that require the hosting of adult content.

No matter which category you fall in or even if you don’t plan on ever hosting any adult material, it’s important to know where the rules like currently and what is expected of you as a publisher. However, it’s also very important to note that, even more so than with other discussions on law, this one is aimed at a U.S. audience and you will definitely want to check your local laws to make sure you comply with them.

So what are the rules with hosting adult content on your site? There simply too many to cover all of them in this article but here are some of the fundamentals you need to be aware of.

First, The Good News

In the U.S., the First Amendment protects your right to post most adult content on your blog. The courts have generally ruled that, outside of a narrow exception for obscene material (more on that later), you have the right to post and distribute adult material on your site (barring, of course, copyright or other issues).

As such, you generally have wide protection for posting non-obscene adult content on your site, at least in the U.S. Bear in mind though that your site can be viewed in nearly any jurisdiction on the planet and can be hosted almost anywhere too. As such, you need to be wary of issues in other countries, even if you are a U.S. citizen.

That being said though, there are still some additional concerns and requirements that come with adult content and here are some of the big ones you need to think about before you publish.

1. Does Your Host Allow Adult Content?

First off, even before you delve into the legal issues, you need to find out if putting adult content on your site is a violation of your hosts’ terms of service. Many hosts, for a variety of reasons, don’t allow adult content on their servers and putting it there can get your site shut down, even if the content was otherwise legal.

So, before you take step one, find out what your host’s rules are so you don’t accidentally break a contract you’ve already signed. However, even if you don’t plan on posting adult material to your site, it’s probably a good idea to stick with a host that allows it, just to ensure no one else is falsely judging your content.

2. Is the Content Obscene?

The Supreme Court, in 1957, found that some speech is so egregious and so harmful that it is not protected by the 1st Amendment. No matter how one feels about this viewpoint, it has been upheld in U.S. law and posting content that is obscene is a crime.

However, determining what content is obscene is a tricky matter. The current test, as laid down in Miller v. California, reads as follows:

(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Obviously, there is a lot of room for interpretation there and two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. However, in general most pornography is not considered obscene by modern standards. Still, given that it is based largely on community standards and those vary wildly, it’s easy to see how there could be a problem.

Fortunately, there are relatively few obscenity prosecutions these days and the few that there are, generally, are for exceptional material.

2. Is it Child Pornography?

This one is fairly straightforward. You should not post any suggestive or questionable images of minors, clothed or unclothed. Also, if someone does post such images to your site, for example as a comment, you should report the act to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CyberTipline.

Your best bet is that, if it seems remotely gray area in this area, don’t post it. Period.

3. Do I Have to Perform Age Verification?

Though Congress has made several runs at requiring age verification on sites that host content considered “Harmful to Minors” they all, including the most recent, have been shot down on First Amendment grounds. This includes the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which suffered a crushing blow at the hands of the Supreme Court.

So, legally at least, there is no obligation to verify the age of your visitors. That being said, it’s still probably a good thing to make sure that adult content does not accidentally land in the hand of minors and there are age verification plugins for WordPress that can help do just that.

4. What About Record-Keeping Requirements?

Current Federal law requires that individuals and companies involved in the production of pornography, to maintain certain records on performers including their legal name, date of birth and any other name they have gone by. However, according to the EFF, the Department of Justice has expanded the definition of “producer” to also include “secondary producers”, a list that includes people who post such images and content online.

As you can see in the link above, there’s a lot of debate and legal wrangling over this issue, including whether non-commercial sites are exempt from the requirements (it is implied they are but there is some debate) and the overall legality of the rules is being challenged.

Also, it’s worth noting that nudity alone does not trigger the record keeping requirement. The image must be considered “sexually explicit” under the law.

Bottom Line

All in all, these are just some of the bigger issues that come with posting adult content to your site. Given all of the new legal headaches that emerge, it may be worth asking yourself if it’s worth the hassle.

If you do, just be sure to understand all of the laws that affect this type of content, specifically the ones in your region, and choose a host that is friendly to adult content. Google’s BlogSpot is a good example.

If you do that, you most likely will be safe.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post Adult Content, Your Site and the Law appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Currently, there at least some 22 countries that block some websites, even more that block VOIP services. China alone represents a block that can restrict access to your site to over 1 billion people.

Though there are ways around most of these Internet blocks, few within the countries impacted have the means and ability to do so, making those blocks, for the most part, at least somewhat effective at limiting communication.

The sad truth is that, though some strides have been made in promoting freedom of access online, many countries are tightening their grip. Recent news from Iran indicates the country tightening its grip and increasing its filtering. Turkey has also seen a similar tightening of Internet restrictions.

But blocking goes well beyond countries. Though less nefarious in nature, many companies and households also use blocking technology to restrict who can access certain sites. Whether the goal is to increase employee productivity or prevent minors from access adult content, the results are often the same.

So is your site being blocked? Are people who might want to visit your site barred from accessing it and, if so, what can be done about it? Here’s a quick look at the current web filtering landscape and what it means for your site.

Is My Site Being Filtered

When it comes to determining if your site is being blocked, there are two sets of filters to worry about: Government filters and private filters.

Government filters vary from country to country and are often in constant flux, a site that’s banned one day in a country might not be banned the next.

Your best bet with government filters is to test your site regularly with any major countries you want to ensure you are available in. For example, you can easily test your site to see if it is available in China and also Iran.

Most countries that have government-based filters have a site that helps users test to see which domains and URLs are blocked, a simple Google search is usually all that’s required.

Private filters are much more complicated. Though they are more static, meaning that results are less likely to change, there are so many companies that do filtering that it’s possible one company blocks your site while dozens of others don’t, or vice versa.

This is made more complicated by the fact that users of these services often can install their own whitelists/blacklists and, in some cases, sites can be picked up by algorithms that aren’t part of the main filters. In short, it can be almost impossible to predict if you are blocked by one of these services and most companies make it difficult to do any kind of testing.

Though email services have public blacklists for spam, few such tools exist for private content filtering on the Web. This can be frustrating, especially when trying to get information as to why you are being blocked or to request an appeal.

Why Am I Being Filtered/Blocked?

There’s no sure-fire way to ensure that your site is or is not going to be blocked by the various entities but there are several risk factors that can give you a clue on the likelihood that you could be trapped in one of the above filters.

1. Your Content: If the content on your site is adult or pornographic in nature, then you have the greatest likelihood of being filtered by both government and private filters. Political sites may be filtered by governments but are less likely to be trapped by private filters. Even non-offensive entertainment content may be blocked by some workplace filters designed to encourage only productive use of the Web.
2. Your Domain: If you host your site on a subdomain of a larger site, such as with Blogger or Tumblr, your odds of being blocked go way up as a filter designed to trap another site on the service can catch you. Also, if you have an unfortunate domain name that, while innocent, may trigger keyword filters.
3. Your neighbors: Though content and domain concerns are bad enough, a lot of web filtering is also based on IP blocks. As such, sites that sit on your same server can cause you to get blocked, even if you don’t know they are there. This is primarily an issue with large shared hosts that house hundreds, even thousands of sites on the same IP address.

In short, there are a lot of reasons you could be blocked and many, sadly, are out of your control. Even worse though is that, if you are unjustly blocked, there might not be much that you can do about it.

I’m Blocked, What Can I Do?

Unfortunately, when it comes to government blacklists and filters, there isn’t much that you can do. Even if you could afford to take the fight to their courts, it’s unlikely that you’d have any luck with it. But even with a legitimate complaint, the time/expense in filing it and seeing it through is far greater than the potential reward.

Private filters, on the other hand, can often be appealed. All you have to do is locate an agent at the filtering company to contact and request a review of your site. Often times, such blocks can be lifted as your site can be reclassified.

Even then though, there’s no guarantee the process will work and, in many cases, it doesn’t. Furthermore, some companies don’t even offer an appeal process.

Once again, legal recourse is very limited because the law, at least in the U.S., supports the right of private citizens and companies to filter their own access. Furthermore, many states actually require that schools and libraries also use filtering technology.

As imperfect as these tools are, they are seemingly here to stay.

Bottom Line

In the end, when it comes to having your site blocked, your best bet is to reduce the risk factors that may cause your site to be filtered and hope for the best, it’s really all that one can do.

All in all, blocking and filtering is just one of the reasons why where you host your site matters legally and why you need to be careful what you put on your site.

After all, you don’t want one simple mistake to cause your site to get denied to a large number of your readers, but that is exactly the prospect you face with Internet filtering technology, both on the government and private levels.

The post Is Your Site Being Blocked? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Though much of this community interaction you can’t control, namely all of the conversation that happens off your site (Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.), a lot of it does take place directly under your purview, including comments on your site, conversation on your Facebook page and so forth.

To be a successful blogger, you need a good community to survive and thrive. However, running a community also comes with a series of responsibilities, both ethical and legal, that you need to be aware of.

Simply put, being a community admin is far more than having a comment box open on your site and letting others post. There’s actually a great deal more to it, especially if you want to have a community that is both productive and on the right side of the law.

1. Have Good Policies

One of the key foundations of any community is the rules that govern it. This means your site needs to have good policies, including policies that both govern member behavior as well as your behavior.

What this means is that, ideally, your site should have both a good commenting/posting policy as well as a privacy policy. All of this can be incorporated into a broader terms of service, but that’s likely overkill for most blogs.

Having these policies will help you and your site in many different ways. First, it puts your members at ease over their information. Second, it sets rules for their behavior, rules that you can enforce without worrying about claims of favoritism or bias. Finally, in the event your community ever does find itself in a legal dispute, you can show good faith in keeping order and what the users agreed to before posting.

In short, good policies go a long way to making your community stronger and safer.

2. Resolve Conflicts

If you get enough people in one place, even if that place is virtual, conflicts are going to happen. However, as a community admin, you need to keep this to a minimum.

While lively discussion and disagreement can be a good thing, when things begin to get personal, a good community admin knows when and how to step in, often times by approaching the sides and mediating a solution.

Though, legally, you can’t be held liable for defamation committed by your users, disputes can still create legal headaches as you can still be sued or involved in a legal dispute between the two parties involved.

This makes it crucial you implement those aforementioned policies well and keep conflicts to an absolute minimum.

3. Remove Infringing Material

Though it might seem crazy that someone would post infringing material in your comments, it can and does happen from time to time. This is more common on sites where you encourage commenters to post original works or provide links to other sources.

Bear in mind that you can not do anything to encourage the infringement, but if someone posts infringing material to your site without your knowledge, copyright law provides you a “safe harbor” to ensure that you are not held liable for that infringement.

However, part of that safe harbor is that you have to remove said material when you are properly notified or otherwise have cause to know that it is infringing.

The best policy here is to make yourself readily available to receive any complaints but also keep an eye out and try to be proactive if possible. Earning a reputation for hosting infringing material doesn’t do you any good, so it’s best to keep it off your site if at all possible.

4. Root Out the Fakes

This might be a shock to some, but not everyone on line is who they claim to be. Some will pretend to be a celebrity, a representative of a company or something else altogether. While this might seem like harmless trolling, it not only causes grief in the community but, in extreme situations, if you act on information and claim to have a relationship with a company or person that you don’t have, can create some legal headaches.

Always be wary and try to verify claims of who a person is. Look at the email addresses provided and ask for proof if needed. Most people who are legitimate will understand the need.

Fake people create problems in a community and create a sense of distrust among your readers. That’s something that needs to be dealt with as a part of building a strong community is at least some sense of trust and acceptance.

5. Being a Benevolent Dictator

To paraphrase my friend Patrick O’Keefe, free speech is for the government not for your community.

The First Amendment clearly states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….

The optimal word in the amendment is “Congress”. It doesn’t enjoin site owners and community admins from shutting down disruptive speech on their site. In short, it applies to rules made by the government, not to rules made individuals or companies.

Being a community admin means understanding that and, when things go too far, being quick to shut down problems. This includes spammers, trolls and anyone else who is violating your aforementioned rules.

If you allow your community to become a free for all, not only will it become a wasteland, but it can lead to legal trouble, especially if it is seen as you encouraging the behavior.

In short, sometimes you have to be the bad guy and put your foot down.

Bottom Line

Being a community admin isn’t easy. It can feel as if you’re herding cats at times and more like you’re a mediator and a judge than an actual leader. But while all of that is true, it’s important to be aware of all the hats a community admin has to wear because, not only are they crucial to your site’s growth, but to your legal security.

The main thing, however, is to just try to run your site in good faith. If you don’t try to create a site that becomes a haven for petty quabbles, copyright infringement, defamation and trolls you probably won’t. Still, it will require work and upkeep to make it happen, including sometimes putting your foot down, but it can be done, as thousands of good communities show.

All in all, if you’re smart and kind to your community, it will return the favor. More often than not, a community is a reflection on the person at its helm and that’s something to remember as you move forward.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post 5 Responsibilities You Have as a Community Admin appeared first on The Blog Herald.

However, it’s inevitable that, with so many people in one “place” that there are going to be disagreements and some of them are going to get quite heated. Just as you don’t always get along with your “real world” neighbors you probably won’t get along with some of your virtual ones either and, also like physical world problems, virtual world ones also, at times, disintegrate into legal disputes.

So, if you blog long enough, especially if you routinely discuss or use work from other people on your site, there’s a chance that you’re going to be the subject of a legal threat.

For the unprepared, this can be one of the most terrifying experiences one can have online. Such threats often come with fears big legal bills, huge settlements and more. It’s pretty easy to paint a worst-case scenario that is either unrealistic or completely impossible.

Still, these are matters that should be taken seriously and knowing what to do is important. Though I’m not a lawyer and certainly can’t provide legal advice, there are steps that most attorneys advise you to take and I’ve outlined them below.

Step 1: Don’t Panic

The first step is, much like with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is to not panic. The truth is the majority of legal threats go nowhere, never escalating beyond words.

You need to take a deep breath and not react out of fear or out of anger. Even though the odds of something serious happening are very slim, obviously, you don’t want to make the situation worse. So take a few moments to calm down and return to rational thought.

A few minutes spent on the front end can save you days and weeks of headache later on.

2. Read the Threat Carefully

Next, you need to read the threat itself very thoroughly. Specifically, you need to understand the following things:

1. Who Made The Threat? Who is the threat from and did they have an attorney send the letter? Obviously, threats from attorneys need to be taken more seriously than an off-the-cuff one from someone who’s angry. But it’s important to know who sent it and on who’s behalf.
2. What do they Claim You Did Wrong? What is the claimed act that injured them and when did they say it took place?
3. What Do They Want? What, in their view, would set things right? In short, what are they demanding?
4. How Long Do You Have? Most letters like this offer a time limit to respond, how long do they give you?
5. What is the Threat? What do they claim will happen if you don’t meet their demands? There could be a wide range of legal actions including a lawsuit, a takedown and more depending on the situation.

With this information, you should have a handle on what the legal threat says, the motivation behind it and what your role in it might be. From there, you can move on and work on a proper response.

3. Comply With the Notice, If Possible

Once you know what’s in the threat, you need to decide how to respond to it. Most of the time, that response includes complying with it, at least briefly.

Though there are some legal threats you can dismiss out of hand, most have at least some grounding in the law. While the other person may not be right in their theories, they probably genuinely believe that they are and may escalate the situation on that belief.

As such, if the request is reasonable, such as remove a post or an image, you can probably comply without putting yourself out too far. While you certainly don’t want to admit to any wrongdoing nor do you want to do anything too far out of your way, complying the best that you can not only helps defuse the situation but gives you time to research the notice and determine what the best course of action long term is.

4. Seek Legal Counsel

With all of that being done if you aren’t an attorney, you need to make sure that you are right about your viewpoints on the matter and, as such, the best thing you can do is seek professional counsel. Most attorneys will agree to a brief consultation for free and will even draft a letter on your behalf for a reasonable fee if needed.

It may not be fun to spend money dealing with the threat, but the peace of mind is usually well worth it. Plus, if the attorney gives you the approval to ignore the threat, you can move on comfortable with your opinion.

That, in turn, can include putting the post or other content back online if appropriate or otherwise undoing anything you did in the third step.

Bottom Line

As I mentioned above, with the vast majority of legal threats, nothing comes of them. Only a tiny fraction of such threats escalate to anything beyond words on the Internet and a lot of that has to do with the difficulties one has in actually taking legal action against someone, especially when they could be in another state or another country.

The truth is, even in cases where there was some level of legitimate wrongdoing, lawsuits are just usually not worth it. Even much less in cases of minor injuries or imaginary ones. If you’ve worked hard to follow the law and haven’t done anything egregious, most likely nothing will come of it.

Though you should always take legal threats seriously, you shouldn’t lose sleep over them. With a good nose for law and a good attorney willing to help out, you shouldn’t have much to fear.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post What To Do If You Get a Legal Threat Online appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Several larger sites, including Flickr and WordPress.com have integrated Creative Commons support into their offerings and even Google has integrated Creative Commons into it search tools to make it easier to locate such works.

But with Creative Commons being so popular and on so many sites, many bloggers are wondering if a CC license is right for them and their site.

The answer, however, isn’t straightforward and it’s a decision every blogger needs to make for themselves. But, with a little bit of information, the choice should be an easy one to make, letting you get back to running other parts of your site.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a licensing system by which bloggers, artists, photographers, musicians and other creatives give others permission to copy and reuse their works, under a certain set of restrictions.

The reason this is useful is because copyright law makes it so that all works of creative authorship are copyrighted by default and that protection prevents others from doing certain things with the work, including republishing it on their site or making a derivative work based upon it.

However, all of those rights can be given away with permission. But getting permission from copyright holders can be a terrible pain. The time it takes to ask permission, wait for a response, negotiate the terms and then act on it is often too long to be practical. Worse still, this places o burden on the copyright holder who has to handle all of the permission requests one at a time.

Creative Commons is a way to streamline this process. The creator, who is comfortable with the idea of others reusing his/her work, simply gives blanket permission to others for them to use it.

To accomplish this, creators choose a set of licensing terms, specifically whether commercial use and derivative works are allowed and generators a semi-custom license for their site. (Note: All current CC licenses require attribution.)

Creators then display the license next to their work. This license includes a human-readable version, a machine-readable version and a legalese full license version. The idea then becomes that others wishing to use the content will not need to ask for permission and can simply go ahead with their desired use. Furthermore, it makes such works easier to locate, helping searchers find content they can repurpose for various uses.

But as great of an idea as Creative Commons is, it still is not right for every creator. Many would be put in a very bad spot if they used a CC license and others will actually see a lot of benefit from the use of a such a license.

Finding out which is true for you is a matter of soul searching as well being honest about your work and your goals with it.

Is a Creative Commons License Right For Me?

As we talked about in our intro to content licensing article back in April, there’s a lot of ways that you can license your work and give permissions for certain uses. Not only can you do it directly one-on-one, but you can also give an implied license through your actions.

However, using a Creative Commons license inevitably gives away far more rights to your work than any of those options and it does so in a far more broad way.

With that in mind, there are many reasons why Creative Commons may not be right for you and your site. Here are just a few of the factors that you should consider.

1. Emotional/Personal Issues: How would you feel with other sites displaying your work with attribution? Would you be happy that work is reaching new audiences or upset that others are gaining benefit from your work without anything more than a link? Are you comfortable with the use of your full work would you prefer it to be left to thumbnails and quotes? A lot of this stems from how personally attached you are to the work.
2. Business Issues: Are you trying to sell copies or access to your work? If so, Creative Commons probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if your business or personal goals are better met by having your work in front of as many eyeballs as possible, it may be a good choice.
3. SEO Issues: Having many copies of your work out there can hurt your SEO as other sites may ran better for your creations than you do. While this is mitigated some by linking requirements, it’s still a real risk to consider.

It’s also important to factor in your audience and your content types. Creative Commons will work much better with a tech-savvy audience that is familiar with the licenses and how they work than it will with an audience that’s never heard of them.

Likewise, certain types of content are just better for the licenses as the are easier to share and modify. Anything with a huge file size, for example, won’t get as much benefit out of a CC license. On the other hand, images are generally the most-used media under CC licenses, not only due to Flickr, but that many blogs look for CC images to use with their posts.

All in all, if you have have personal or business issues with using a CC license, you shouldn’t do so. Following the pack in this area can be dangerous. But, if you don’t have any reason not to use it and can see some potential benefit, it’s likely worthwhile.

In the end, that is likely true for most of the content created by bloggers, though everyone has to make their own decisions.

Bottom Line

In truth, there’s no right or wrong decision when it comes to choosing whether you want to use a Creative Commons license or which license you want to use. Having or not having a CC license will never make you a better blogger.

Instead, a CC license is part of a larger content strategy, about how you want others to use your work and how your content can best serve you.If CC fits into that strategy, great. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too.

Either way, your first priority is determining how your content can best help you and if you’re better off restricting its use or letting it go and, if so, how far.

Once you know that, the choice is clear when it comes to Creative Commons.

In short,

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post Is Creative Commons Right for Your Blog? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

To make matters worse, there’s a great deal of conflicting and confusing information on the Web and what good information there is, generally, is scattered across multiple pages and sites. This makes learning about the law difficult and means you can spend a great deal of time just trying to keep yourself out of court.

Fortunately, several bloggers and blogging-related organizations have worked hard to produce legal guides that give you a good breadth of information in a simple, single work that you can easily read or search through.

With that in mind, here are five of the best of those guides, what’s in them and how they can be useful in helping you protect yourself and your rights.

1. EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers

The EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers is probably the best known and the most-widely linked-to legal blogging guide.

Focusing on legal liability issues, the EFF’s guide goes into intellectual property, defamation (including section 230) and privacy among other issues. The guide uses easy-to-understand language that makes it easy to read as well as a Q&A format that makes it very skimmable and easy to locate the information you want.

The best thing about this guide is that it comes from an organization on the front lines in defending bloggers’ rights and a group that has been very active in the courts regarding them. This has helped keep the guide relevant and up to date even as the law has changed.

All in all, it’s a solid legal guide that, while U.S.-centric (as with pretty much all of these guides), is also fairly complete and applies to just about everyone.

2. Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide

The Citizen Media Law Project has a great legal guide for all online publishers that goes well above and beyond in terms of completeness.

The guide actually has two parts. The first is a general guide aimed at legal issues that apply equally across the U.S. This covers issues such as copyright, privacy and general advice on how to get legal help. On the other side, they have a state-by-state breakdown of various rules that might apply more on the state level, such as forming corporations, accessing public records, open access to meetings, etc.

Without a doubt, this is the most complete and robust legal guide for bloggers. However, it’s so complete that a lot of the information may not apply to you and, sadly, many states don’t yet have guides written for them.

Still, if you have a legal question about blogging, this guide is a great place to get it answered.

3. 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know

Where the Citizen Media Law Project’s guide is robust and, possibly excessively, complete. The Aviva Directory’s guide is much more streamlined and is actually a very short read. Entitled “12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know”, the guide takes a look at 12 of them most common legal questions a blogger might have and what the law says about them.

Short, sweet and very much to the point, this guide is a great starting point for anyone who wants a very brief overview of the many legal issues that can impact bloggers and where the law sites on them right now.

4. A Quick & Dirty Legal Guide For Bloggers

In the same vein as Aviva Directory’s guide, Outspoken Media has a “quick and dirty” guide for blogging and the law. The guide is basically a series of debunked myths dealing with the law and blogging. It targets issues of intellectual property, defamation and, perhaps most unique, anonymity.

Though the guide itself is very brief and leaves a lot of gaps (only limited discussion on each topic and many potential legal issues omitted), it does a great job debunking many of the more common misunderstandings bloggers have about the law and it provides a very quick, easy read for anyone interested in legal issues with blogging.

5. Podcasting Legal Guide

Finally, for bloggers who are doing more than just writing and are also doing podcating or other multimedia work, Creative Commons’ Podcasting Legal Guide is a must-read.

Though it covers much of the same ground as the other guides, it targets itself almost solely at podcasting and the slew of new issues it raises including music licensing, distribution of a podcast and much more.

Since the guide is by Creative Commons, it focuses mainly on copyright and other intellectual property issues but it keeps the focus squarely on audio and also includes a good guide for using CC-licensed audio in your podcast.

Bottom Line

While all of these guides are great, it’s important to remember that the legal climate online is both exceptionally complex and ever-changing. Any questions you have are, in the end, best answered by an attorney.

However, since that isn’t always practical, these guides and others like them are great tools for getting a general lay of the land and a basic understanding for how the law applies online.

Still, bear in mind that these guides are far from complete, do not provide advice specific to your situation and, over time, will likely become dated and less useful overall.

If you can keep those elements in mind, these guides are all more than worth the read or to at least bookmark as a good reference.

After all, you never know when you might need a quick piece of legal information, which is what these guides are best for.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post 5 Legal Guides Every Blogger Should Read appeared first on The Blog Herald.

However, where you host and where what you choose for your domain has a large bearing on your site and there are many factors that you need to consider.

Many of the factors are actually technical. Your server’s proximity to your visitors affects its speed and not all countries are as well connected as you would like for hosting a site. For example, you wouldn’t want to host a site aimed at an Asian audience somewhere in rural South America.

But on top of the technical considerations are legal ones. Whenever you sign up for a hosting account in another country, you’re doing more than moving your site there, you are, in many regards, subjecting yourself to the laws of that nation.

That can have some dire consequences for your site if you aren’t careful and, in extreme cases, can even result in your arrest and possible extradition.

In short, thinking about these issues is an important consideration when choosing a host, but one that few actually weigh.

An Issue of Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction is a basic legal concept that gives a certain government or political body authority or responsibility over a matter. The term refers both to areas of law that sometimes separate responsibilities (such as state vs. Federal crimes) and also geographic areas of responsibility, such as national and state borders.

Typically, the actions you take are the jurisdiction of wherever you are. Your city, state, country, etc. is responsible for policing your behavior or resolving any disputes that arise from it.

However, there are many ways that you can subject yourself to a jurisdiction that is somewhere else. For example, often times when you do business with someone else in another jurisdiction, you may subject yourself to their jurisdiction, either implicitly, just by the act itself, or explicitly, for example, through a contract.

You can also subject yourself to another jurisdiction by doing something within it. In the tangible world, that may be difficult but on the Web it isn’t. If you set up a hosting account in another country, your server and your data reside within that country’s borders. As such, both are within their jurisdiction, even if you physically are not.

This has a lot of potential implications for you and showcase why you should be wary of making such a move, at least until you’ve thoroughly researched the country’s laws and how they may apply to you.

How Things Can Go Wrong

The problem with this is quite simple: Different countries have different laws.

Any kind of law that could apply to your site could be altered. Copyright, libel, obscenity, etc. are all laws where different countries have drastically different rules on the books.

Granted, with many of these laws you can actually subject yourself to other jurisdictions through your action. For example, if you libel someone in another country, they can sue wherever they feel their reputation is harmed.

However, there is a big difference between having a threat of a lawsuit in another jurisdiction and having your data there. Not only does it open up far more jurisdictional issues, it also gives the government of that country a way to strike back at you easily, without going through your local courts.

This can create a serious issue when your host country has different laws than yours. For example, you probably won’t face any significant repercussions for criticizing the King of Thailand as long as you and your site are hosted in the EU (though you may be blocked in Thailand), you can virtually guarantee your site will be shuttered if it is hosted within the country.

Another example is deals with defamation. In the U.S., ISPs and hosts have no obligation to remove allegedly defamatory content. However, UK ISPs are in a very different position, one where it is the best thing for them to do. This means that, if libel issues were to erupt on your site, a British host might be compelled to remove the allegedly defaming content where a U.S. host would likely not.

Being aware of these differences is critical to making a decision about where to host your site, especially if you want to host somewhere overseas.

It’s Not Just Hosts, It’s Domains Too

However, if you think that limited solely to where you physically host your site, the issue is actually much more broad and even includes domains.

The problem is that every domain TLD (.com, .net, .co.uk, etc.) is controlled by and under the jurisdiction of a country. Most of the main Internet TLDs, including .com, are actually under U.S. jurisdiction.

This means that the country overseeing the domain can, and in some cases has, revoke the domain if they feel your site is violating their laws.

For example, sex blogger Violet Blue had her URL shortner revoked by the Libyan government because it used the .ly extension. Even though the content of the domain was legal in the U.S., her home country, the site was forced to move to a .us domain extension.

However, the U.S. might be the ones taking things to the next level. Richard O’Dwyer, a UK citizen who ran the site TV Shack, is actually facing extradition to the U.S. to face charges of criminal copyright infringement. Even though he and his site were both in the UK, the U.S. is claiming jurisdiction because of the fact he used a .com domain.

Though that case is pending, it could be a sharp warning for anyone who is seeking to use a domain TLD from another country, especially if their site might violate its laws in any way.

Bottom Line

The Internet is challenging the very notion of jurisdiction and creating significant problems with the long-established dividing lines of authority and power.

When data and content can trivially cross physical borders, so do the legal issues they often raise.

Though there’s no easy solution to this, you need to be aware of these issues as you think about where to host your site. For the most part, if you can host it in your native country, that’s likely best. However, with all of the technical issues that could raise, especially when it comes to choosing a domain, it may not be practical.

In the meantime, the best thing you can do is research your nation’s laws and the laws of those you work with to make sure you are not running afoul of any of them.

It’s tedious work, but invaluable if you want to ensure that you stay out of trouble on the Web.

The post Why Where You Host Your Site Matters Legally appeared first on The Blog Herald.

But while both are similar in that they are ways to punish or discourage unwanted behavior, they are radically different in both what they are and how they operate.

As a blogger, you find yourself operating in a variety of societies. This includes traditional ones such as your local community, your country and the world as a whole as well as digital ones such as the blogging community and the Internet community.

This has some fairly profound implications for the laws and ethics you have to wrangle with as you’re not only caught between the duality of the two elements themselves, but in the layers of often conflicting standards of all the societies you reach and are a part of.

To unravel this mess, we have to first take a look at the differences between law and ethics and understand how they each impact bloggers in slightly different, but very powerful, ways.

Separating Laws and Ethics

The difference between law and ethics is fairly simple to grasp in the broad sense of the words:

1. Law: Laws are written down and enforced through the courts, either civil or criminal. They have the backing of some government entity that can enforce punishment on those who violate them.
2. Ethics: Ethics are often disagreed upon and sometimes even personal in nature. They are guidelines on what is acceptable behavior similar to laws, however, even when society roundly agrees on an ethical standard, those who violate it are not subject to punishment from government.

There is obviously a great deal of overlap between the two. Murder, for example, is very widely thought to be unethical but it is also very illegal. Same is true for most other major crimes.

However, there are areas that are only covered by one or the other. For example, driving a few miles an hour of the speed limit, in many cultures, is not considered unethical though it is considered illegal. Likewise, lying to or cheating on your spouse is not necessarily illegal, but is viewed as highly unethical.

Such a case found its way into the courts in 2004 when a woman sued her boyfriend for lying to her. The boyfriend had claimed that he intended to have children with her though he knew he was not capable of doing so. The courts ruled that, while he acted in a deplorable manner, it was not the place of the courts to punish him.

Somewhat confusing the matter is that many fields have ethics boards that do enforce a written code of ethics and some of those punishments can have some effect under the law. For example, a doctor can lose his license to practice as can a lawyer. However, those boards aren’t operated by the government and though their rules more closely resemble laws in may ways, they are still considered ethical issues.

However, bloggers don’t have such an ethics board. Despite at least some attempts to codify a blogger’s code of ethics, no such singular board exists nor does any such board hold sway over you.

Still, none of that means that ethics aren’t important in blogging, in fact, they may be more important in blogging than other industries that actually have such boards.

Ethics in Blogging

All of this raises two separate but equally powerful questions: What are the ethics of blogging? And what are the repercussions for violating them?

The first question is a very difficult one because, as with all ethics, there’s a lot of personal interpretation and variance. However, much of what we think of as “blogging ethics” comes straight from the offline world.

General morals such as not lying, cheating, etc. definitely apply with blogging. For example, plagiarism in blogging is highly frowned upon, even when it doesn’t rise to the level of copyright infringement.

That trend continues elsewhere in blogging. For example, lying in a post or failure to disclose a conflict of interest may or may not be a legal issue, but it is almost always considered unethical.

Of course, ethics, as with any kind of code of behavior, is of limited value without some form of enforcement. However, since blogging ethics are not, by their very nature, the law there’s little that the government can do unless it is an area of overlap. Furthermore, without an ethics board that can actually hand out meaningful punishments, there’s no enforcement in that sense either.

However, most ethics don’t have such an enforcement and they seem to work reasonably well. The reason is that the community itself does the enforcing, choosing not to associate with or trust people that routinely violate the code of ethics. This can, in some cases, be a more severe punishment than even what the law could have provided.

On that front, the blogging community has an upper hand in enforcing its ethical code. Easy searching combined with an instant way to reach the entire globe means that finding and alerting others to unethical blogging should be easier than ever.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Not only blogging still a very secretive activity, meaning most only see the final work, few bloggers seek and call out unethical peers. Furthermore, with so many petty squabbles online, any genuinely unethical blogger will likely be confused as just another flame war victim.

In short, even though most bloggers have a very good sense of ethics, those who don’t are rarely held accountable to them, not because they can’t be caught, but because the Web is such a big place and there’s plenty of room for liars and cheats to hide out in plain sight.

Bottom Line

If you think blogging ethics, at times at least, is a bit like the wild west, you’re probably right. The reason isn’t because most bloggers are immoral or that there is no ethical code, it’s just that on the Web there is no effective way to enforce it.

After all, even if you can successfully call out an unethical blogger, there’s nothing stopping them from shutting down and opening right back up under another name.

When identities are as disposable as an email address and it is incredibly easy to wipe the slate clean, holding others to an ethical code is a challenge. This isn’t to say anonymous blogging is a bad thing, it can be a very powerful tool used for many good purposes, but we have to realize that it comes with drawbacks.

Still, the good news remains, most bloggers do agree, even if it is an unspoken pact, on the basics of the blogging ethical code and the majority do follow it. Proof that, even without highly effective community enforcement, ethics are a major part of blogging and an element to study and follow.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post The Difference Between Law & Ethics in Blogging appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The problem is that email doesn’t go directly from point A to point B. Your email, as with nearly all communication on the Internet, is first passed through a series of intermediaries that receive it and send it on its way again.

Since this happens within the blink of an eye it’s easy for us to miss it or not think about it. However, this system has drastic impacts for the relative privacy of email both in terms of how secure our information is and what others can do with it.

The truth is simple. Email, at least by itself, is not a private method of communication and should never be treated as such. Your email is not safe from snooping by the government, by your employers, by your ISP nor even disclosure by your recipient.

The impact this has on you depends on how you want to use email, but the basics of the situation are pretty much the same for everyone, never put anything in an email you don’t want disclosed publicly later.

The Shortest Route

The problem with email, as mentioned above, is that email doesn’t go directly from sender to recipient but is passed through a series of routers and servers, each of which can easily read the message and store it. When it comes to email privacy, this creates not just a slew of both practical and legal issues.

In part because of this, email is not given the same level of privacy as other means of communication. For example. it’s akin to sending a postcard through the mail versus sending a sealed envelope.

If you send a postcard through the mail, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy as the information on it can be publicly viewed. So anyone who read and rebroadcast information on a postcard is in a different position than one who steamed open a sealed envelope, where such a reasonable expectation exists.

With email, unless you take some additional steps, there is no virtually no expectation of privacy. This can even be compounded by using free email services or, even worse, your work email.

Some of this has been codified into law as well. For example, in order to get access your email older than 180 days, in the U.S. law enforcement only needs a subpoena, not a warrant. This is per the Electronic Communications privacy Act of 1986. This says nothing about the PATRIOT Act and other pieces of legislation passed that may make it even easier.

However, all of that just details the government’s ability to snoop on email and says nothing about the ability of the recipient to disclose its contents. There, since there is such a limited expectation of privacy, if any, it’s widely believed that, with only a few exceptions, the recipient is free to disclose what they want from the email, including forwarding it on to others or posting it on their blog.

In short, while the U.S. government, as well as many other governments, have at least some restrictions on when they can access your email, your recipients have almost no such obligations. Meaning your biggest threat to email privacy may not be third party snooping, but disclosure by the person you’re trying to reach.

What Can You Do?

If you’re worried about the privacy of your email, there are only two things you can do realistically:

1. Encrypt Your Email: First, you can use some form of email encryption, such as GnuPG to prevent others from reading your mail. Not only does this make reading your mail and disclosing more difficult as a practical matter, but it increases your expectation of privacy and may provide some additional legal protection.
2. Don’t Treat Email as Private: Or, perhaps more practically, you can assume everything you send via email can and will be viewed publicly and not send anything that you don’t want on the evening news.

In the end, your best protection against broad disclosure of your email is the fact that so many are sent. With nearly 300 billion emails being sent every day, the odds of any one of your messages getting enough public interest to become a sensation is slim to none.

That being said, there is a very real threat of disclosure to parties you don’t want information leaking to including clients, friends, family members and even people just Googling your name or business.

Those issues alone can cause more than enough headache to make just about anyone wary of sending private information via email.

On Republishing Email

With all of that being said, one of the more common questions I get asked is if you can legally republish something that was said in an email on a blog. The answer, as with most such questions is “depends”.

Generally speaking, you can repeat information learned in an email. However, you need to be wary of a few exceptions to the rule.

1. Privileged Information: If you are republishing information that you got under some other kind of privilege, such as with an attorney or doctor, it is still a violation to disclose it. This also applies if you signed a non-disclosure agreement or similar contract.
2. Copyright Issues: Emails are protected by copyright so repeating an email word-for-word or very closely to it may be an infringement of copyright.
3. Publicity Given to Private Life: If you publicize any fact about one’s private life that would both be highly offensive to a reasonable person and not relevant to the public, then you may still be violating their privacy.

In short, while you generally can disclose what is contained in an email, there are some clear exceptions to the rule. However, it’s worth noting that those confidentiality and other disclaimers afford little protection, especially when applied to all outgoing email.

All of that aside, one has to ask themselves a difficult question. Not “Can I republish this information?” but “Should I republish this information?” While you might legally be able to republish what you learned in an email without permission, it will likely upset people who contacted you, who are often expecting some level of confidentiality.

Routinely publicizing other people’s messages sent to you (or even others) is not a way to make friends, especially when you can often just ask permission and run with it having that person’s cooperation.

Those stories, in turn, are often the best as you can usually get additional information that can help you do even more with your write up.

Bottom Line

If you’re looking for privacy when it comes to email, you aren’t going to find it. Unless you’re taking additional steps to protect your email, you can generally assume everything you send via email is public from the moment you hit send.

As such, it’s best to use email with that in mind and to not send anything you don’t want disclosed. Likewise, while there are exceptions to the rule, you can generally reproduce email on your blog but you need to be wary of not just legal but also ethical issues doing so raises.

In the end, there is nothing secure about email and the quicker we accept that, the quicker we can make better use of it.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post Your Email, Your Privacy and Your Blog appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Liu’s case has drawn so much attention because of how outrageous it seems. To be arrested and convicted criminally for giving a restaurant a bad review seems insane, especially in the U.S. and other nations that put a high value on free speech.

But while Liu’s case may be an extreme one, bad reviews are actually fraught with legal peril. To be clear, many of the legal problems that are associated with negative reviews also hold true for positive ones but companies and individuals tend to be far more angry and far more litigious about people saying bad things rather than good ones.

So, if you’re looking to write a negative review, here are a few things to watch out for as they could be levers that your target might use against you and your site in an attempt to silence you, justly or unjustly.

Looking at Defamation

As Mr. Liu found out, defamation is a common angle of attack used by those unhappy with a negative review and a routine way to shut down sites that criticize.

We’ve talked a great deal about defamation over the course of this column including how legal trolls like to shop for friendly jurisdictions and how you are protected from defamation taking place in your comments.

Defamation is a common false legal threat that bloggers face and much of that threatening comes from negative reviews. As such, when writing a review that bashes a company, service or product you need to make sure that you are comfortably within the boundaries of defamation law.

On that front, the advice is surprisingly simple. Limit your criticisms of the subject of your review to one of two things:

1. Facts: Facts are protected speech and can never be defamatory. Tell the details of your experience and focus on the things that are provably true. This includes both the facts about your your experience with the subject and the subject itself. However, this means also being fair and presenting all of the relevant facts, including those that might work against your opinion.
2. Opinion: Stick to your opinion on the subject. Your personal feelings and opinions are protected as well, so long as they aren’t presented as being factual.

Under no circumstances should you make guesses about the subject that you can’t prove, especially if those guesses put it in a negative light. Even jokes or satire can go awry if your subject feels that others might take it seriously.

In short, focus your review on facts that you can prove and feelings you have. Don’t let your imagination run wild and, perhaps accidentally, start inserting opinion as fact or making claims that are untrue or could be misconstrued.

The Copyright Problem

If you’re reviewing a copyrighted work such as a book, movie, album, game, application, etc. you will probably want to use at least as small portion of that work as part of your review. Whether it’s a quote to make a point, a screen grab or a short clip.

Likewise, if you’re reviewing a service or a product, you’ll likely have other copyrighted material you may want to integrate in such as shots of the product, marketing copy and other material that the creator of the subject has provided.

The problem is that some copyright holders, though not many, can be very selective with their enforcement and a use of their work that was not considered an infringement in a positive review or even a neutral one might suddenly incur their wrath when it’s used as part of a negative one.

Generally, reviews have a high level of protection when it comes to fair use as commentary and criticism are two of the most protected uses of copyrighted material. One usually has to use an outlandish amount of a copyrighted work in a genuine review for it to be considered an unfair use.

That being said, it’s worth taking a few minutes to familiarize yourself with fair use and then understand how it works.

In particular, pay attention to the fact it is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement and not a right. It can’t and won’t shield you from a malicious lawsuit though it may protect you from being liable.

Once you understand that, in your review, your best bet is to use only the amount of copyrighted material that you need to make your point. Generally, the less material you use and the more original thought you add, the better off you are.

A Few Words on Disclosure

Finally, in addition to the above problems, it’s also worth noting that, in 2009, the FTC published guidelines that govern how blogs and other celebrity endorsements should disclose any financial or other relationship they have with the companies and products they are promoting.

While it’s unlikely you would find trouble giving a bad review to a company that you have a business relationship with, but you need to think about all of your potential conflicts of interest including any competitors you have a relationship with.

For example, if you did a paid review for a competitor or consulted with them in the past, not only might your readers consider that a conflict you should disclose, but legally it could be an issue as well.

Admittedly, this is a gray area at this time, the FTC guidelines don’t cover this behavior explicitly, only paid endorsements, but it is easy to see how the law could apply, especially if your negative review of one product/company/etc. can be seen as an endorsement for its competitor that you have a relationship with.

All in all, this is just another legal area to watch and be careful with moving forward.

Bottom Line

All in all, a negative review doesn’t drastically increase your risk of doing something that is legally or ethically unsound, however, it doesn’t mean that others might be more motivated to take action against you, legitimately or otherwise.

That’s why, when you’re writing a negative review, it’s worth taking your time to make sure you’re within the bounds of the law before hitting publish.

The good news is that most companies don’t get overly litigious against negative reviews as it tends to actually make things worse for them. While some, such as the PR people behind Duke Nukem Forever, might take other action, at least it doesn’t involve legal trouble.

Still, you should always make sure your legal house is in order

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post How Giving a Bad Review Can Bring You Legal Trouble appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The truth is that, while anonymous blogging may be great for certain purposes, it isn’t a bullet proof vest that lets you do dumb things legally without fear of reprisal. Even if you can bring together a perfectly anonymous site, you have to be flawless in your execution of it ensuring that every single interaction, no matter how small, is untraceable.

While anonymous or pseudonymous blogging might be good enough to fool your mother, your boss or your friends, it won’t be enough to fool law enforcement nor anyone with adequate motivation and resources to track you down.

Anonymous blogging may free you up to say things you otherwise couldn’t, but it doesn’t free you up to break the law. Basically, if you’re blogging under a different name, you should expect to be found out if you make it interesting enough for anyone to seek out your information.

The Technical Challenges to Anonymous Blogging

Anonymous blogging is not a matter of just choosing a good pen name for yourself, using a domain privacy service and then blogging to your hearts desire. If you want to be truly anonymous, you have to think about every element of your site and how they can be traced back to you.

Law enforcement and civil plaintiffs alike can send subpoenas to almost anyone or anything connected with your site in a bid to get more information about you. Depending on the situation, these subpoenas can compel them to turn over any and all data they have on you.

For example, if you use a domain privacy service, it is trivial to subpoena your registrar and obtain the information you actually used to register the domain, including your payment info. The same goes for your host, which can be compelled to give up the information you signed up for an account with and, if necessary, the IP addresses you use to access your account.

Though anonymous blogging systems do exist, they are spotty at best and are often unreliable due to the fact they often attract less-than-legal bloggers.

True anonymous blogging requires that you ensure there is no connection between your real identity and the site as well as no direct connection or traceable connection between your network/your computer and your blog’s server.

To be clear, there are ways to do this and many great guides have been written on this subject, including an official one by the EFF and one on TechSoup.

However, especially for someone new at using these tools, the process is intimidating and the since perfection is required to be completely safe, it’s virtually guaranteed that there will be a break in the protection.

In short, if hackers and virus authors are finding it almost impossible to stay truly anonymous online, there isn’t much hope for the average blogger, especially considering that they are doing something far more public with many more avenues to that open them up to discovery.

Why Anonymous Blogging is Still Useful

The moral to the story above is quite simple, given enough motivation and resources, just about anyone can have their identity online discovered. There is virtually no way to 100% guarantee that you are never found out.

That being said, it’s very similar to other forms of Web security. Given enough interest and expertise, virtually any site, computer or network can be hacked into. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t use antivirus software, firewalls, solid passwords and other tools to make yourself as difficult of a target as possible.

While anonymous blogging might not be enough to protect you should law enforcement take an interest in your site or some powerful entity wish to sue you, it can definitely prevent your boss from finding out what you really think about him or your parents from learning what you really did last weekend.

As mentioned in this guide to anonymous blogging on Problogger, there are actually different levels of anonymous blogging including:

1. Full-on Anonymity: Where you use a clearly fake name and give absolutely no identifying information.
2. Semi-Anonymity: Where you use a fake name but give out other identifying information, including, in some cases, images.
3. Secret Identity: Where you take on a real-sounding fake identity that you hope will prevent others from attempting to find your real name.

Each has their strengths and weaknesses but the basic difference is that the more information you give out, the less anonymous you are but the more your readers are able to identify with you. Likewise, the more things you lie about, the less your readers will trust you, especially if the lie is confirmed later.

All in all, you need to choose a level of anonymity that is right for you. If you just want to make sue future employers can’t Google you, semi-anonymity is likely fine. However, if you’re whistleblowing or otherwise engaging in an activity that may have real-world reprisals, you may want to use “Full-on anonymity” or even create a secret identity.

In short, weigh for yourself the risk of having your identity discovered, how likely someone is to make an effort to find it and how dedicated those efforts will be. From there, choose the level of anonymity that fits your needs (if any). Just don’t expect being an anonymous blogger to serve as cover for illegal activities as you very likely will learn that your pseudonym provides no protection at all.

Bottom Line

As mentioned above, anonymity online is much like security online. There’s no way to be completely secure and no way to be completely anonymous. It’s just a matter of the time, resources and expertise needed to trace someone back to their real name.

The quicker you accept that, the quicker that you learn what anonymous blogging really means and what it truly is best for. Though it won’t keep you safe from the government or from a very motivated plaintiff in a legal case, it can and will protect you from prying bosses, family members and others who might take issue with what you say online.

Basically, it will do little to help you avoid legal consequences for your actions but it may help you avoid other forms of backlash, some of which might be just as problematic and unwanted.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post The Problems with Anonymous Blogging appeared first on The Blog Herald.

We’ve talked a lot in this column about the various activities that might get you and your site in legal hot water, including some of the false legal threats you may face.

But that begs the question, who is likely to do either make the threat or file the lawsuit? While the answer could easily be just about anyone as lawsuits online are as varied as thy are in the bricks and mortar world, there are definiely some groups that have been far more litigious than your average netizen.

However, actual data in this area is very difficult, if not impossible, to come by. Not only does one have to factor in the courts of over 50 states and nearly 200 countries, but many of the most important legal threats never actually make it to court.

So, unfortunately, a lot of guesswork is involved but it doesn’t take much research to see some trends forming. With that in mind, if you’re worried about being sued for your blogging activities, here are some groups that you probably want to avoid or at least be wary of messing with.

5. Movie Studios

When it comes to Bittorrent and other P2P lawsuits, the movie studios, especially the independent ones, have been very active litigiously, suing hundreds of thousands of suspected file sharers over the years in in massive lawsuits that include tens of thousands of “John Doe” defendants each.

However, when it comes to bloggers, the studios have been a bit more quiet. Yet, they haven’t hesitate to drop lawsuits from time to time including one against a blog that was posting scripts online and another was sued for leaking a topless photo from an unreleased scene of movie.

That being said, most of the time bloggers find themselves butting heads with movie studios, it’s for leaking non-public information or doing something that is clearly and significantly copyright infringing. Movie studios, over all, have a decent history of not interfering with sites that post about movies, include released trailers and otherwise promote the movie as intended.

4. Record Labels

Where the movie studios have been active on the P2P front in recent years, the record labels have long since stopped their file sharing litigation campaign. However, their legal actions with bloggers remain much less clear.

Recentlly the record labels were allegedly involved in the closing of many music blogs on BlogSpot. The move was controversial because, reportedly many of the sites were operating legally and even working with the labels.

The good news, however, is that most legal action taken by the record labels comes in the form of takedown notices and site closures rather than lawsuits. In that regard, most would prefer to have their site closed than face the expense and headache of actual litigation.

3. Parody/Fan Blog Subjects

Though they might not be a group in the strictest sense of the word, it is impossible to completely ignore the pattern of companies suing fan blogs and parody sites for a wide range of things.

For example, very recently the blogger behind WTForever21 has been battling legal threats from Forever 21, the company the blog pokes fun at. Likewise an Apple fan site was shuttered in a settlement over the site’s leaking of confidential information.

For the most part, fan sites seem to be safe until they cross a line, such as when the Harry Potter Lexicon site attempted to publish a book, but parody sites begin life with a somewhat confrontational relationship and it seems some companies just don’t have a sense of humor.

2. Newspapers

There’s not much doubt that newspapers are on hard times right now but some have responded by targeting and suing bloggers as well as other sites that report their content.

Of particular interest in this area is Righthaven, a group that files lawsuits for infringement of content from the Las Vegas Review Journal and the Denver Post. The company has filed well over 200 lawsuits against sites republishing content from those papers, and has even targeted some big name blogs, including the Drudge Report.

Though Righthaven may be on the way out due to a series of legal defeats, other news organizations have been very active in filing takedown notices and taking other action, such as tracking content via services like Attributor and using that information to either secure takedown of the content or even target advertisers.

But as controversial as some of the industry’s tactics have been, for the most part they have only ensnared bloggers that have reused a large portion of their content without permission, making them fairly easy to avoid.

1. Stock Photo Companies

Finally today, of all the groups that have been the most active with legal threats against bloggers, the stock photo industry has probably been the biggest. Having sent tens of thousands of legal threats to website owners, many stock photo companies have made a side business out of tracking their images and collecting settlements, usually over $1,000 per image, for their misuse.

This, in turn, is why it is so important to make sure that your images are properly licensed and that you get them from reliable sources.

The good news, however, is that the industry primarily targets commercial bloggers and site owners. They don’t seem to widely target non-commercial use of their images.

However, if you do get caught using one of their images, you should widely expect that you will be getting a threatening letter in your mailbox sooner or later.

Bottom Line

While these five groups are definitely some of the more common to sue and threaten bloggers, they are far from the only ones. With recent reports of a Taiwan blogger actually being jailed over a negative review of a restaurant, it’s clear there are many legal threats out there and many willing to exploit them.

This is why it is important you know the law and what your rights/responsibilities are under it. If you do that, you can avoid these groups as well as others who might seek to threaten you.

That, in turn, will help ensure that your blog stays active and stays strong while you stay out of the courtroom.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post The 5 Groups Most Likely To Legally Threaten Your Blog appeared first on The Blog Herald.

This, often times, creates problems where a blogger oversteps a legal boundary and finds themselves either being sued or threatened with legal action. However, it also can create the reverse problem, one where the blogger is threatened with legal action when they haven’t done anything against the law.

To be clear, in the U.S., anyone can sue anyone for any reason at any time. If your sole purpose is to avoid a lawsuit, being within the law is, unfortunately, no protection. There’s always a chance you could have to spend the time and money to defend yourself in court.

However, if you have a more practical goal of not being hit with a lawsuit that has a chance of success, you still don’t want to give in needlessly to false legal threats. With that in mind, here are five of the more common false legal threats that bloggers face and why they carry no weight.

1. If You Don’t Remove that Comment, You’re Libeling Me

A lot of times, commenters on your site will say something that is mean spirited toward someone else and it’s possible that the person who the comment is about will write you and request its removal.

While it may be a reasonable reaction on their part, if they threaten to sue you for libel, they are way off target.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act makes it clear that the medium of a libelous message can not be treated as the source. As such, if the comment didn’t come from you but was merely posted on your site, you have no responsibility for it and no need to remove it.

That being said, you may still want to remove the comment because libelous comments do not make for a good community and it probably isn’t the kind of discussion you want to encourage. However, the legal risk of having it up is effectively nil, at least as long as you are in the U.S.

2. You Can’t Name Your Site That, That’s Copyright Infringement

People without understanding of intellectual property law have come to use copyright to mean just about every type of infringement, real or imaginary. However, all types of intellectual property have their limitations.

Copyright explicitly does not protect titles and names so anyone claiming copyright infringement in a blog name or domain is missing the point.

It’s possible that copying a name might be a trademark infringement, but trademark is very limited protection and only covers names used in conjunction with a business (meaning personal blogs effectively receive no protection) and against uses that might cause confusion in the marketplace.

For example, if you make a blog entitled “Magic Hub” that talks about Magic: The Gathering it can’t infringe on a site called “Magic Hub” that sells magic tricks as they are in two different marketplaces.

Also, trademark can’t protect generic terms, try as hard as some companies do to make it.

Still, you might want to change the name of your blog if it is the same as another site, it’s always better to have an original site, but it’s important not to let false legal pressure make you do it against your will.

3. Your Negative Review is Libelous

Negative reviews are a common source of legal headache for bloggers as companies will routinely stretch the boundaries of the law to try and get them taken offline.

It’s important to note that it is not defamation to write an honest negative review of a product, service or company. As long as the material facts of the review are accurate and honest, including what the subject of the review is and what happened when you tried to use it, your opinion is protected.

Though you can not materially and deliberately misrepresent a product, for example saying that it doesn’t do something it does or say that it makes claims it never has, as long as you stick to the facts about a product and your experience with it, you can review it, even negatively, without fear of being defamatory.

Truth and opinion are defenses in a libel suit so, as long as you stick to those things, your review should be fine.

4. You Can’t Talk About My Product/Service, That’s Infringement!

Some companies, especially in the face of a negative review, will try to claim you using their trademarked name is a violation of their rights, citing either trademark, or even worse, copyright infringement.

As mentioned in the second item, copyright does not protect product, service, company or any names at all. Trademark does, but only against confusion in the marketplace.

You are completely within your rights to use a trademarked name in a review when talking about the actual company, product or service.

Don’t let a company who dislikes your negative review attempt to bully you into taking it down, especially when you didn’t say anything untrue.

5. You Can’t Repeat That, It’s an Invasion of My Privacy

Though you can easily and legitimately be sued for violating someone’s privacy by publicly disclosing private and/or embarrassing information about them, you can’t if the information has already been made public.

For example, if someone publishes an embarrassing story about themselves on their blog, it’s considered to be made public already so repeating the facts of it on your site, even if your site is much more popular, is not a violation of their privacy as they already made it public.

Private facts cease to be private once they are publicly disclosed and repeating private facts already made public, even if first disclosed by a third party, is not a violation of their privacy.

That being said, if the private facts turn out to be untrue, you can be sued for libel as repeating a libelous statement is no defense, unlike if it is merely private.

Bottom Line

It’s important to remember that, if you’re ever confronted by a legal threat, no matter how bogus it seems, the best thing to do is to seek good legal advice on how to handle it. If the threat is false, an attorney can likely tell you as much in very little time and possibly even draft a response letter for very little cost.

Even in cases of clearly false legal threats, this is time and money well spent.

The main thing though is to know your rights on the Web and to not be easily cowed by false legal threats. Even if the person making them genuinely believes they are within their rights, you can’t let yourself be intimidated needlessly by misguided arguments.

In short, the first step to protecting your rights is knowing them and this column, hopefully, is a good start to understanding some common situations you don’t have to back down.

Your Questions

Have a question about the law and freelance writing? Either leave a comment below or contact me directly if you wish to keep the information private (However, please mention that it is a suggestion for The Blog Herald. This column will be determined largely by your suggestions and questions so let me know what you want to know about.

Disclosure

I am not an attorney and nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice.

The post 5 False Legal Threats Bloggers Routinely Face appeared first on The Blog Herald.