Anyway

At North­ern Voice this year I was jet-lagged, hav­ing arrived from Rome about 10 pm the night before, so didn’t make it to any­where near the num­ber of talks I wanted to go to. I did go to Nancy White’s, which was an excel­lent, lively, enter­tain­ing ses­sion. It gave me lots to think about in terms of how to make my own present­a­tions more inter­est­ing (ok, that may not have been the point to her talk, but it was one of my take-aways), as well as how (little) I blog and what I should do about it. Blog more, I know, but get­ting over the “I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been busy, so what should I start with” hump can be more dif­fi­cult than it appears. Not really writers block, more like “is it worth­while writ­ing on this when I haven’t writ­ten for so long”-block. Hmmm, more think­ing needed on that one.

One other nice thing about North­ern Voice is meet­ing a range of people whose blogs I’ll start look­ing at, that I wouldn’t know of oth­er­wise, and hav­ing dis­cus­sions on issues ran­ging from global cli­mate change to SAML!

I took part in a panel (three non-lawyers, so we wrote WANL (IANAL for three people) up on the white­board in big let­ters) that described some hassles people can run into with blogs and some basic things to do (like be care­ful what you write, blog­gers are journ­al­ists in some ways and can be sued, and fig­ure out whether it’s worth the hassle before you decide to fight). I learnt quite a few things and I hope the rest of the audi­ence did too. Includ­ing the fact that some­times you really need a real law­yer, but it’s not always an easy task to find someone who is an expert in this area, and there’s not a lot of case law, espe­cially when it comes to cross-jurisdictional issues. A com­ment on Jef­fery Simpson’s blog men­tioned it would be bet­ter to have had a real law­yer there on the panel; as Dar­ren poin­ted out, we did try! Maybe one of the three people in the audi­ence who admit­ted to being law­yers will volun­teer to give a talk next year, although I would expect it to be as full of “this is not legal advice” dis­claim­ers as our panel was (law­yers seem to like say­ing that sen­tence when talk­ing in gen­eral terms, such as at a con­fer­ence or an art­icle on a web site). Some of the ques­tions were about what to do if someone tries a denial of ser­vice attack on your web site (basic answer: you may need to move to an ISP that has the infra­struc­ture to cope with it, as send­ing a cease and desist let­ter, always assum­ing you can find an address to send it to, may not have the desired effect, espe­cially if it’s to another coun­try). Most blog­gers won’t run into any of these prob­lems, of course, there’s some­thing to be said for being safely down in the long tail!

Any­way, here are a few web sites you might like to look at if you’re inter­ested in the gen­eral topic. Some are from my own research, and oth­ers from the dis­cus­sion at NV. They’re in no par­tic­u­lar order.

• Star­force threatens to sue Cory Doctorow
• Defam­a­tion on the Inter­net — con­cen­trates on Cana­dian law
• CNN news item on a recent US Fed­eral Law — quite a lot of dis­cus­sion about this, includ­ing at Bruce Schneier’s blog where the com­ments are also interesting
• Defam­a­tion in Cana­dian Cyberspace
• Defam­a­tion: Libel and Slander Law — gen­eral inform­a­tion and advice for the US
• Elec­tronic Fron­tier Found­a­tion Blog­gers’ Rights — applies to people liv­ing in the US, applic­ab­il­ity in any other coun­try will of course vary (“this is not legal advice” dis­claimer, of course)
• Basic Ele­ments of Defam­a­tion Law — another US-based law­yer who states “this is not legal advice” but it’s worth look­ing at anyway
• Photographer’s Right — a nice sum­mary from a US law­yer about rights that pho­to­graph­ers have in general
• Find­law — inform­a­tion about the law and law­yers in the US
• Chilling Effects Clear­ing­house — a web site set up by the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Found­a­tion and some uni­ver­sit­ies in the US to tell people who live there about their online rights
• Cana­dian Inter­net Policy and Pub­lic Interest Clinic — Cana­dian legal clinic with FAQs on rel­ev­ant issues