Judge Says Blogs Are Guilty Of, Well, Just Guilty Dammit!
Techdirt
It's not totally clear what's going on with this story, but it's worth passing along anyway. An article on a tech news site reports how Edward Fadeley, a retired Oregon judge, "has launched a blistering attack on the blogosphere", saying it's full of lies and defamation, with no easy legal recourse to keep things in check. This isn't really true -- libel and other laws regarding defamation apply online, just as they do off. An apparently misguided person spouting off about the dangers of the internet isn't really anything new, but the sheer lack of context for the outburst is puzzling. The rant looks to have first appeared as an op-ed in The Oregonian newspaper in June, but apparently Fadeley felt strong enough about it to issue his own press release repeating it this week. Whatever the motivation, it would be nice to see a former state Supreme Court justice put a little more effort into creative a coherent argument. He says, "Ten years ago Congress passed a law requiring blog operators to protect the public by self-regulation," and it's not clear at all what he's talking about, maybe part of the Communications Decency Act that protects site owners from comments others leave on their sites, which has been affirmed by courts several times -- but we're relatively certain that members of Congress (known for being such a tech-savvy bunch) ten years ago had never heard the word "blog". He also says that bloggers don't deserve the same protections as journalists because they're not held to the same standards, apparently unaware that "real journalists" can make stuff up too, or even make defamatory claims. He closes by saying law needs to catch up to technology, but that simply isn't the case when current laws apply to new media just like they do old media.
