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

That's just a start off the top of my head. However, the world does not move at the same speed of the law. Just a few years ago, you wouldn't have been able to talk about Twitter. Cell phone information delivery? Pretty new. Technology is stretching the bounds of where material can appear and in what context legal issues can arise. That's why I'd suggest reading Can the law keep up with technology? on CNN.com. There aren't many answers, but a lot of questions you need to be considering.