Saturday, September 20, 2008
Online Media Law
I just completed the Media Bloggers Association course on Online Media Law offered by NewsU.
It was a great refresher course on defamation, invasion of privacy, and copyright infringement. The use of recent court cases gave it a timeliness and tie to current events that is missing if you try to simply read about these topics in books or on sites. Of course this is also a brief online class, estimated to take one to two hours, and as such is an overview.
One issue of interest to me is that the course states the Communications Decency Act, Section 230, protects bloggers from being held responsible for comments made on their sites even if they are edited for length or decency so long as the original meaning is not changed. This legislation is from 1996, and what confuses me is that earlier this month the Poynter Institute’s Feedback Guidelines had information about courts deciding that site publishers were responsible for feedback if it was approved rather than automatically submitted. Poynter and NewsU are affiliated and that information is no longer on the guidelines page. However the Wikipedia entry on Section 230 does not list any new relevant cases.
This is interesting to me, because a couple weeks ago I disabled comments after reading the information at Poynter. With over 50 spam comments coming in per day, there was no option other than manually filtering comments. This may change things ...
