Posted on 07/17/2008 9:44:09 PM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
What is the ages old misconstruction of Shakespeare? "First kill all the lawyers." Well, one might excuse bloggers if they might wish to add the officers of the courts to that death sentence, at least if the experience of the bloggers at New York's "Room 8" blog are concerned.
For Ben Smith and his fellow "Room 8" bloggers, the world got a bit topsy-turvey not long ago when he was served with a grand jury subpoena by state prosecutors demanding that the identities of anonymous posters on his website be revealed.
Worse, the court wouldn't inform Mr. Smith exactly why they wanted the identities of several posters and what they would do with the information once they got it.
Smith's subpoena got retracted and the identities weren't needed after some legal wrangling, but incidents like this are beginning to occur more and more. Bloggers are running up against the law with increasing frequency in the US and the world. Of course, for much of the world's bloggers, their blogging is landing them in jail to be tortured by oppressive regimes like China and the like, but bloggers are also finding their work under question in the free world, too.
It's still the wild west as far as the law is concerned with blogging. Blogs haven't been around long enough for the law to have settled on what to do with them, what rights bloggers have or don't have, and what they can or cannot do. The status blogs have in the eyes of the law is still incredibly amorphous. Are bloggers journalists? Should they get the same protections as newspapers? Are they entirely private communications? Should they be held to exactly the same libel laws as other media? And, where do anonymous bloggers stand? Should they be forced to reveal their identities? How about commenters on blogs? Should they be forced to publicly declare their identities? Is their privacy somehow perfectly secure?
These are questions that the law is just beginning to grapple with.
But where should we bloggers stand on this issue? Should we rise up with one voice and stand on untrammeled free speech?
I maintain that we cannot claim that blogs are somehow above the same rules that applies to the media generally. Of course blogs should be considered free speech, especially where it concerns political blogs. However, there is no reason at all to think that blogs should be held above the law where it concerns libel. After all, blogs have just as much capacity to destroy someone's life if used maliciously as any TV show or newspaper.
See the rest at Publius' Forum...
this blog has been having the same sort of problem. i can understand how the blogger could get in trouble: she's posting the names and images of certain people in a place they most certainly don't want to be.
very interesting topic, this one.
There is no right to free speech on the FR. Views and comments are subject to the philosophy and rules of the proprietor.
true. but then again, any rules about the articles one posts or the comments one makes are completely at the discretion of the blog owner, not a judge. it seems to me that any lawyer would have a tough time making slander case against free republic stick.
How many lawyers does it take to roof a house?
One, if you slice him very very thin.
“... if my Neighbour hath a Mind to my Cow,
he hires a Lawyer to prove that he ought to
have my Cow from me.” ( IV:5;13)
It is a Maxim among these Lawyers, that whatever
hath been done before, may legally be done again:
(IV:5;15)
Gulliver’s Travels
by Jonathan Swift
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