blogging and the law

I’m currently in the middle of a storm around an email I recently sent out, and around posts to my blog which have been brought to the attention of my erstwhile. Much of the storm around this has to do with writing, publishing and ethical issues debated for centuries. As an observer to this debate, over more than thirty years, I’ve always sided with the author’s right to publish, whether in thinly disguised autobiography or in direct factual terms, material about his or her life, the people that he or she knows, and so on. Of course with this right comes the responsibility, either to be as factually accurate as humanly possible, or to make it clear that this is the author’s perspective. I’m certainly not absolutist about it. In fact this is a very murky and complex area, as any examination of the debate would show, and I’m not always sure that I’ve stayed on the right side of the line, but I’ve always been acutely aware of the issue.
The burgeoning of blogging highlights this old problem anew. Nowadays it’s the easiest thing in the world to start blogging, and there are plenty of blogs, for example, being published by juveniles. What does the law say about a fourteen-year-old-boy writing a hate blog about his mother? About a depressive writing positively and invitingly about suicide? About an ex-husband slagging off at his ex-wife?
The blog is different from the journal, which is often unearthed after its author’s passing, when the issues it deals with are no longer ‘hot’. It’s more immediate and therefore perhaps more potentially dangerous, but the dangers are diluted, it seems, by the fact that starting your own blog is as easy, almost, as raising your own voice. So one poisonous blog can be easily antidoted by another’s. Also most blogs have provision for commentary, making them sites of contestation, very po-mo. Of course the blog-owner finally oversees those comments, as is only fair, so that the truly unacceptable can be eliminated, but this also problematic, obviously.
You would expect, I think, because of the greater looseness of the blog in terms of its possible content and style, that the application of the law to limit it would also be looser. A greater subjectivity, a greater freedom of expression might be allowed. This is no doubt happening, though perhaps only because the general public is allowing it. That’s to say, there have probably been few cases as yet of bloggers being brought to book under defamation laws, because blogs are not yet seen as being as potentially damaging as the stuff made from dead trees.
After having just quickly glanced at Australian defamation laws, the first second and third words that come to mind are complexity, complexity and complexity. For a start, defamation laws vary with state and other jurisdictions – an obvious problem for a medium that transcends such jurisdictions.
It’s been suggested, in my case that, since there’s a person out there who’s apparently traumatised by the fact that I even mention that person’s name on my blog, my webhost could be pressured to ask me to remove all references to this person from my site. I can’t imagine, though, why webhosts would be susceptible to such pressure, unless they were jumpy due to previous defamation actions. In any case they would surely check out the site themselves first, and make some sort of independent assessment. They might also make some sort of effort, if they could, to check out the person doing the pressuring, to determine whether that person had the wherewithal to mount a defamation action, bearing in mind these chilling remarks from a website on defamation and the internet - ‘In practice, the laws are inaccessible to ordinary individuals who are defamed due to the exorbitant legal costs involved in bringing a defamation action’.
Unfortunately, this sentence itself, if true (and it surely is), tends to render the rest of my exploration merely academic. However, there are still some very important ethical issues involved, and I’ll have a look at them in my next post.