Legal info for Bloggers

It's amazingly easy to start blogging.  Even those without a lifetime of geek credentials can be posting to a new weblog in a matter of minutes with Manila, RadioUserland, LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, MSN Spaces, and on and on.  It's often even free.  And you can blog in many languages, including Arabic and Farsi and Chinese, with multiple character formats.  Publication and syndication have never been easier.

What's much harder is knowing what the rules are.  Fortunately, a few good souls out there have done some work to give you a starting point on the law as it relates to blogging.  For one, the EFF has developed a web site, with a number of FAQs, devoted to this purpose.  EFF's staff is chock full of some of the most cutting-edge lawyers in this space, so their guidance is ordinarily sound.  Along with the usual caveats, EFF notes of its guide: "The goal here is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected."  A great place to look for more detail on an ongoing basis within the EFF world is Wendy Seltzer's blog.

Another great place to go in looking for legal information about blogging is The Committee to Protect Blogging's site, which aggregates resources from elsewhere.  Most of what I found there, including a link to a page at the Berkman Center's site (where I work!), looked pretty trustworthy as well.  It points, for instance, to a wiki set up by the truly amazing Nart Villeneuve at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which demonstrates their excellent judgment in terms of sources.

Of course, these sites by necessity are just starting points; good legal advice, unfortunately, must be fact-specific and requires good in-person legal help.  But these sites might help you stay out of trouble as you start blogging.