law suits on line

From the KC Star

More lawsuits trip up bloggers on Internet
By DAN MARGOLIES
The Kansas City Star
Local blogger Dan Ryan has never been sued for his postings, although one commenter whose anti-Semitic ravings he deleted accused him of slander and threatened “to own my house.”

Even so, Ryan, whose daily musings about politics, homemade beer and whatever else strikes his fancy appear at www.gonemild.com, said he was not overly concerned about getting sued.

“I have the benefit of being fundamentally judgment-proof — like most bloggers,” he joked, referring to his relative lack of wealth. Also, he said, “I try to avoid anything slanderous or anything that would be actionable.”

Ryan’s caution may stem from his training as an attorney. Most bloggers, though, are less attuned to the niceties of the law. An increasing number are finding themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

The Citizen Media Law Project has tallied 280 legal actions against bloggers and other online publishers nationwide. Compared with the millions of blogs out there, that might not seem like a lot. But the numbers have been trending steadily upward, from a mere four lawsuits in 1997 to 89 last year.

Although only a handful of cases have resulted in verdicts or settlements, a few have been eye-popping enough to give even the average basement- residing poster pause.

The largest was an $11.3 million defamation verdict in Florida against a woman who, on various Internet bulletin boards, disparaged the head of an organization she hired to remove her son from a Costa Rica boarding school as a “crook,” “con artist” and “fraud.”

Closer to home, St. Charles, Mo., authorities launched a criminal investigation after Lori Drew, an adult woman posing as a boy online, taunted 13-year-old Megan Meier with a series of cruel messages. Megan subsequently committed suicide.

Although the Missouri investigation was dropped, a federal grand jury in California indicted Drew for conspiracy and computer fraud.

The Drew case, to be sure, represents the extreme end of the blogging spectrum, where unfiltered, unmediated, unedited content is posted on the Internet.

It’s only a matter of time, experts said, before bloggers provoke more lawsuits, whether for defamation and invasion of privacy or for copyright infringement.

“In fact, every time someone publishes anything online, whether it’s a news article, blog post, podcast, video or even a user comment, they open themselves up to potential legal liability,” David Ardia, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote recently on Poynter Online.

Ardia, who also directs the Citizen Media Law Project, noted that “even the smallest blog or most esoteric discussion forum has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.”

Mainstream news organizations have insurance policies that cover the copyright and defamation risks associated with online publication. But until now, such insurance wasn’t available for individual bloggers.

Last month, Kansas City-based Media/Professional Insurance, which bills itself as the largest underwriter of media liability insurance in the world, launched a product aimed at the ordinary citizen blogger. BlogInsure, as it is called, appears to be a first — liability insurance for bloggers covering costs and damages for claims of defamation, invasion of privacy and copyright infringement.

“To my knowledge, this is a unique product,” said Media/Pro’s chairman, Leib Dodell. “It’s an expansion of what we’ve been trying to do for the last 30 years, which is to stay abreast of developments in the media industry and make our coverage relevant to them.”