Andrea Weckerle

Josh Hallet, who is hosting Friday’s BlogOrlando conference, emailed the session leaders a reminder that our role isn’t to spoon feed the audience with information, but to lead and facilitate the discussion. Phew, that makes it a lot more interesting!

And since the Legal Issues session is scheduled for right after lunch, I hope no one’ll be in a food coma when they come back :-)  Why? Well, because this session gives us an opportunity to cover some important areas, such as whether bloggers are considered journalists and if so, what legal protections they may have; libel & slander (and the role of satire); how to protect against liability regarding blog comments left by other people, and so on. And if we have time, we can also talk about what conflict management approaches, short of using cease and desist letters or initiating other legal action, may be open to bloggers.

In other words, this session will hopefully provide basic information that ultimately will help us avoid some mine fields and allow us to focus on what we really enjoy doing — communicating and interacting with our readers and others in the community. 

Here’s a brief list of some helpful sites to know about:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
• Media Bloggers Association
• The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
• The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
• Stanford Law School for Internet and Society

And these lists of blogs, compiled by 3L Epiphany, are also good information sources and commentary to keep on hand:

• Media Law blogs
• Internet Law blogs
• General Intellectual Property Law blogs
• Technology and the Law blogs

I recently started bookmarking legal-related information pertinent to blogs, podcasts and vlogging on del.icio.us. While the list definitely isn’t comprehensive, maybe you’ll find something of interest to you, so feel free to have a look.   

See you Friday!