Lawyers

Lawyers VS the Blog!

By Chris Rangel MD ⋅ April 22, 2002 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Lawyers vs the Blogg! - Howard Kunz writes a lovefest about Bloggs from another main stream columnist who is a convert to blogging and bloggisim. It’s all fine and good. After all, blogging is just ordinary people making their thoughts known on the internet for others to see. Cute and cool, right? Well . . . . that is if you live in a lawyer-free world! I have yet to see any mention nor any concern on any blogg site about the possibility of suits filed against bloggers for libel and defamation. The possibility is very real and there is precedent. A woman named Nora was sued by the biotech firm viragen after she posted on a message board that the management was “crooked” in response to rumors about the fact that despite $10 million in losses that year, the CEO had earned earned $296,000. Viragen lawyers demanded an apology and a retraction and would not back down. Faced with huge legal bills if she chose to fight, Nora relented and “posted the apology, copied word for word from a document drafted by a Viragen attorney”. Apparently this is not a unique nor an isolated situation, “It’s not unusual,” said Lee Tien, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyber-rights group. “We hear about people being sued for online posts — and getting into crazy situations — about once a week.” The point of libel and defamation suits are to protect individuals and organizations against unfair and false accusations intended to slander i.e. harm their reputations. Often this is implied to be via a public forum rather than the private ranting of a half drunk individual at a Saturday night beer hall. Bloggs are certainly public and some entertain as much internet traffic as Op-Ed articles in the New York Times or Washington Post. But unlike seasoned columnists many bloggers are unaware of the potential legal pitfalls that they may find themselves in.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The vast majority of bloggers engage in thoughtful and intelligent discourse that is at the very heart of blogging i.e the democratic, free exchange of ideas and opinions. However, this is not to say that lawyers in this country will not use libel and defamation suits to silence opinions that go against their clients. It’s too easy for them to do. Just take an individual or organization with huge legal resources against a single private individual who publishes his or her thoughts on a single web page and you have the classic David vs Goliath scenario. Except in this case Goliath is armed with a phalanx of lawyers and millions in legal funds against David’s single family income. Nora in the above example never even got the chance to prove that the management in question were in fact “crooks”. She was manhandled by a legal system that puts the advantage on the side with the most money and power. Hardly democratic nor respective of free speech. The danger is not that cases of blatant libel will rightfully be sued but that opinions stated on blogg pages will be squelched by even the threat of legal action. These threats are nothing new to free speech. Jerry Falwell took Hustler publisher Larry Flint to court over a CARTOON that implied that Falwell had sex with his mother. Certainly not in good taste, never the less, Flint’s comical ribbing of the humorless Falwell was upheld by the US Supreme Court but it took Flint’s vast magazine empire to defend him all the way to the nation’s highest bastion of free speech. I doubt that the average blogger has a fraction of Flint’s resources. Look for this issue to become much more important in the future for bloggers and the nature of free speech online in general.