What You Write Could Get You Sued

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From the Wall Street Journal comes an arti­cle cheer­fully titled Bloggers, Beware: What You Write Can Get You Sued — WSJ​.com

Be care­ful what you post online. You could get sued.

In March 2008, Shellee Hale of Bellevue, Wash., posted in sev­eral online forums about a hacker attack on a com­pany that makes soft­ware used to track sales for adult-​​entertainment Web sites. She claimed that the per­sonal infor­ma­tion of the sites’ cus­tomers was compromised.

About three months later, the soft­ware company—which con­tends that no con­sumer data were compromised—sued Ms. Hale in state court in New Jersey, accus­ing her of embark­ing ‘on a cam­paign to defame and malign the plain­tiffs’ in chat-​​room posts.

In her legal response, Ms. Hale, 46 years old, claims she is cov­ered by so-​​called shield laws that pro­tect reporters from suits, because she was act­ing as a jour­nal­ist and was inves­ti­gat­ing the hacker attack while research­ing a story on adult-​​oriented spam.

It’s unclear gen­er­ally if “shield laws” for reporters pro­tect blog­gers or not. It’s also unclear to me, based on the WSJ arti­cle alone, how they would help Ms. Hale. The point of such laws is to pro­tect jour­nal­ists from being forced to reveal con­fi­den­tial sources, not to pro­vide them with immu­nity from defama­tion lawsuits.

In any case, WSJ arti­cles comes across as rather alarmist in my opin­ion, but it does con­tain an impor­tant reminder: what you write online is gen­er­ally pub­lic, and that you should be aware of the poten­tial impli­ca­tions of what you write. This is as true about avoid­ing poten­tial defama­tion or sim­i­lar suits as it is to think about the per­ma­nence of what you write on line in terms of future employes. So think before you write.

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