By William Brister
A Blog is short for Web Log and has become a new and exciting form of communication. It is like a diary or a journal personal or corporate that is posted on the Internet for public viewing and updated from time to time. It enables people to publish comments, ideas and opinions for others to read. Besides being a personal from of expression, corporate blogs offer a platform for marketing new ideas, communication channels between management and employees, discussion of industry and media trends, news coverage and even political expressions. We also have law blogs, school blogs and marketing blogs.
Although blogs have now assumed importance a being a part of the contemporary social and corporate lifestyle, like all other forms of published expressions, blogs can be harmful. As blogs gain popularity as marketing tools, lawyers say companies have to consider the legal issues associated with them. Just like printed published materials, blogs have raised many challenging issues and are open to copyright infringement, defamation suits and privacy issues. This has necessitated companies to be aware of the legal phenomenon involved and establish ground rules to avoid lawsuits and other legal troubles.
However, law on blogs and laws on blogging still remain a gray area and there is little legal precedent for a company planning a blog site. It is only in the very recent past that courts across the country have started addressing this issue and applying the current framework of law to blogs. Courts may soon decide whether bloggers are immune from defamation suits under the Communications Decency Act. Although, slow in coming, blogs are not entirely without legal frontiers and are slowly getting conversant with the blogging problems. In the meantime blogs are multiplying and changing the way people communicate. Until the law is clarified, bloggers should know they are potentially liable for any false and defamatory speech they post online.
The first concern that comes to mind is that of libel and whether the company will run into legal problems if they start blogging. By virtue of blogging being easy to publish and correct, it is also easy for a blogger to fix the information that may be damaging or false. If you are quick enough to correct the mistake in your blog, libel, typically will not be a problem.
Although, it is not necessary for a lawyer to review every blog, some precautions won’t hurt. Run it past by a lawyer, add appropriate disclaimers and ensure that your bloggers are reliable. Another thing that you can do to avoid unnecessary claims is to have a policy for your own company blog and one for how you deal with employees who have their own.
Given the fact that a blog contains text, images, hyperlinks and even music or video files one must be aware of the intellectual property matters applicable to blogs. Issues include ownership of content, person liable for infringing material, trademark issues as well as the potential disclosure of trade secrets by employees or third parties.
Typically, the person creating the content and posting it to the blog will own the copyright. In the case of a company, it owns the content posted by an employee and has the right to redistribute or reuse it for other purposes. The company may also acquire the copyright for the content.
If the infringing content is posted to a corporate blog that is operated by an employee then both, the business and the person posting the content could be held liable. However if the content is on a personal blog, the risk to the company is minimal.
Just as with other publish material, the title of the blog may be in question if it copied form another trademark. Additionally, the use of the company’s trademarks or the trademarks of other companies in blog posts could also give rise to liability. It would be better for the person initiating the blog to clear the trademark issues beforehand so as not to cause infringement problems.
Confidential issues and trade policies should be strictly kept off blogs. Employees should be warned of public disclosure of sensitive information as well as made aware of intellectual property rights. Posting of such information may create liability issues and strict policies regarding these should be laid down from the beginning.
When advising clients, lawyers should emphasize the use of common sense and the application of existing legal rules and corporate policies to business and employee blogs. This strategy should go a long way toward protecting the business that ventures into this new medium.
William Brister http://www.legalproguide.com - An answer to all your legal needs.
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