Keeping Up With Media Law
The law moves slowly - as it should. Whether common law or statute, you want relatively stable rules of the road so you can live your life and do business with some degree of predictability. And when you're in the media - and pretty much everyone reading this blog is likely in the media - law becomes particularly important. You have a host of things that can come up:
- libel and defamation rights of privacy and publicity of people you cover
- people suing because they took whatever advice you offered and didn't like the results
- infringement of intellectual property
- actual or simply alleged copyright infringement
- new potential uses of material, which means new rights to consider
Labels: defamation, law, libel, media law, rights
posted by Erik Sherman | 6:20 AM
1 Comments:
What we all need is a generic disclaimer in small print that we can cut and paste at the bottom of our weblogs to protect ourselves from responsibility for our own word. I used this one successfully a couple of years ago when I was writing incendiary blogs about our regional public transit agency:
*Confidential Information: The information in this e-mail is protected by my cousin Guido (who will come to your house and work you over with the blunt end of a summer sausage if he finds out you finked on me to the man). Anything I said in here that can be used against me in court, in the news media or at any board meeting held in the upstairs room at Rick's Blues Bar is confidential. All recipients of e-mail from me are expected to purchase expensive file shredding software and destroy this message utterly after you have committed its contents to heart. You are further enjoined not to reveal the contents of this message to anyone even if you have to die under torture to protect me. (Hey, if you didn't want the responsibility, you should never have opened this file in the first place!)
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