If you’ve followed our advice to manage your personal brand online, you have your own web presence well underway by now. Congratulations, you’ve followed us into a legal minefield. Such at least is the conclusion to be drawn from reading the excellent 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know that was recently posted at Aviva Directory.
I thought I was following the online legal situation fairly closely, but some of this was news to me (for example, that the FTC is apparently digging into the whole murky business of paid product-related blog postings). Aviva also briefly covers (with links to deeper resources) such topics as deep linking, whether you can safely delete abusive comments, who owns Web 2.0 user-contributed content, the legality of thumbnailing images from other sites, spam laws, and journalism shield laws.
Of course no short legal guide in any topic is every comprehensive. I would have liked to see some basic analysis of general first amendment issues on the internet, for example, especially with the recent kerfluffle over at Digg about pirated HD-DVD keys. For such issues of fair use and digital rights management, the Electronic Frontier Foundation remains the definitive reference.
If you’re outside of the United States, there may be less here that applies to you – though the status of international law on the internet is far, far from clear. My own recommendation is that even web workers in other countries should read and ponder these issues, especially if you’re using a U.S.-based hosting service.
Though many bloggers and other web workers would probably agree with Dickens’ Mr. Bumble that “the law is an ass,” it’s good to keep in mind that the law also costs some people a good deal of money and puts other people in jail. There’s certainly some protection to be had in the sheer number of sites out there (it’s unlikely that we’ll all get sued at once), but if you’re prudent, I suspect reading the Aviva article will send you off to review and revise your own site’s terms of service and privacy policies.
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