By: Edward Amartey-Tagoe, Accra-Ghana.
I must admit I discovered my passion for blogging through a colleague of mine not too long ago. And since then my interest in this activity has kept on escalating by the day. What I however never considered was the fact that I could be held liable for every single word I put on my blog. I am sure a few other bloggers too didn’t have this knowledge. It makes this activity a little bit scarier; I however am in support of holding everyman responsible for his utterances in one way or the other .
In the United States, the First Amendment was adopted on December 15 1791, and states that;
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The other section of the debate is defamation of character. Defamation of character is often used to describe accusations of slander, libel or both. Whiles slander involves verbal derogatory statements, libel involves written ones. Despite the freedom of speech regulations in place to encourage as much free expressions as possible from the public, we should still be concerned about what we say or write because such statements could end us up with heavy fines.
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Lawsuits against bloggers increased from just 13 in 2003 to 106 in 2007 in the US. To date there have been about $17.4 million in trial awards against bloggers, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York. Bloggers are feeling so comfortable writing about almost anything that comes to mind, therefore there is the temptation to venture into areas where even Angels fear to tread.
It is so amazing to know how many blogs come up every day. There are blogs that talk about almost everything, from exciting Ghanaian experiences to secrets hidden in the bedrooms of African women. As much as we have legal instruments supporting us to express ourselves in every creative way we can, we need not forget that we can be held liable for every character we put on our blogs.
It is very interesting though; this trend has created a business model for some legal and insurance firms to make a few dollars. Insurance companies are now insuring bloggers, promising to shield them against lawsuits in this direction. Bloggers pay between $200 and $350 per year to be protected from such court drama.
At the same time, companies are increasingly employing automated technology to scour the Internet for copyrighted materials and negative remarks. Because of this, sites that are in the business of rating everything from college best Viagra sale centers to doctors and contractors are being sued by recipients of unfair reviews. Sometimes the problem has to do with using copyright materials such as pictures, templates and diagrams on our blogs without proper permission. In worse cases bloggers are sued for directly plagiarizing an article authored by someone else and making it look as though it were their own. Here are nine copyright myths I knew almost nothing about.
I recently discovered a very interesting Copyscape tool that would be of immense assistance to bloggers who are interested in avoiding plagiarism and also finding out who is stealing their ideas. I am throwing in an advice to my fellow bloggers all over the world to be very careful about the kind of posts they come up with, unless of course one has a few bucks to waste on legal fees.
