Legal Hazards of Writing Online

Legal Hazards of Writing Online
Via today's Globe and Mail, a report on libel chill: Media stardom is pricey. Excerpt: Many bloggers dream of getting mainstream recognition for their work, but unfortunately for some, the attention they're getting comes in the form of a lawsuit instead of media-star status. Earlier this week, Steelback Brewery president Frank D'Angelo filed a $2-million libel suit against Ottawa-based blogger Neate Sager for making what he says are disparaging comments...

Via today's Globe and Mail, a report on libel chill: Media stardom is pricey. Excerpt:

Many bloggers dream of getting mainstream recognition for their work, but unfortunately for some, the attention they're getting comes in the form of a lawsuit instead of media-star status.

Earlier this week, Steelback Brewery president Frank D'Angelo filed a $2-million libel suit against Ottawa-based blogger Neate Sager for making what he says are disparaging comments about him.

In another recent case, Montreal art-gallery owner Chris (Zeke) Hand has found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit as a result of something he wrote on the blog he maintains for Zeke's Gallery.

Warren Kinsella, a prominent blogger and newspaper columnist, sued another blogger for libel last year, but settled the case after the blogger apologized for his remarks and paid Kinsella's legal costs.

Zeke, also known as Chris Hand, is being sued for libel for comments he posted on his blog in Montreal. ‘Once you start dragging things into court, I do tend to dig my heels in,’ he says.

And p2pnet, a British Columbia-based news site that writes about file-sharing, is still fighting a libel lawsuit launched by Kazaa tycoon Nikki Hemming based on comments that were posted on an article about the company.

Read the whole item.

Blogging a massacre
This has been a very bad day in the United States. The massacre at Virginia Tech has shocked the world, but it has also taught us something important: In a major disaster, the victims themselves will tell us about it. The Virginia Tech website provided basic information within minutes. Even more to the point, news of the killings was carried by email and text messaging and blogs like Planet Blacksburg....

This has been a very bad day in the United States.

The massacre at Virginia Tech has shocked the world, but it has also taught us something important: In a major disaster, the victims themselves will tell us about it.

The Virginia Tech website provided basic information within minutes. Even more to the point, news of the killings was carried by email and text messaging and blogs like Planet Blacksburg.

The mass media like CNN were using cell-phone video from students on campus. Other students have bitterly complained about the slowness of authorities to alert them, whether by email, text messaging, voicemail, or the campus public-address system.

The countries with the most advanced communications systems will be the first to tell the world about catastrophes like this one. But even Third World countries have cell phones and some kind of internet access. Increasingly, we will see car bombings in Baghdad and riots in Mogadishu, disease outbreaks in Jakarta and AIDS deaths in Zimbabwe, reported by those who are there.

Can We Still Talk Online?
Dave Beers, my editor at The Tyee, has a thoughtful article today about the famous interactivity of websites: Can We Still Talk Online?. It won't be a surprise to webwriters that responses to their work are often ignorant, abusive, and even threatening. Dave uses The Tyee's experience, and that of other online magazines, to invite still more interaction on the subject. Maybe this is a good time to dig out...

Dave Beers, my editor at The Tyee, has a thoughtful article today about the famous interactivity of websites: Can We Still Talk Online?.

It won't be a surprise to webwriters that responses to their work are often ignorant, abusive, and even threatening. Dave uses The Tyee's experience, and that of other online magazines, to invite still more interaction on the subject.

Maybe this is a good time to dig out a piece I did on the subject about ten years ago: "Time for Flame Wars to Flame Out" was first published in the Vancouver weekly Georgia Straight in the summer of 1997.

An email correspondent once described my views on education as a “Socialist brainwashed, Communist-cliche’d, agit-prop spew of black lies, red herrings, straw men, Marxist-Stalinist Totalitarian, 1984, Brave New World, One World Dictatorship, mooching, felonious, treasonous, cowardly, dangerous, insensitive, [and] anti-human.”

After that he got positively hostile.

Some online veterans would shrug this off as just more proof that any idiot can get on the Net, and most already have. But as many can confirm, this kind of verbal abuse is all too common in cyberspace. The Usenet discussion groups in particular are full of sarcasm, insults, degrading language, and outright obscenity. In the mailing lists, where you have to subscribe to get access to discussions on specialized topics, even college teachers and dog lovers can blow their cool.

Why should this be? Are we just awful people? I don’t think so. But I do think the technology of the Internet has encouraged users with a particular mind-set, and they in turn have largely created an online culture that promotes abuse.

Addicted to Jolts
To do anything on a computer, you have to obey some arbitrary rules and go through certain ritual actions: click the mouse, hit return, type a precise string of keystrokes. This favors a certain kind of obsessive, ritualistic personality. The reward, for such a personality, is to go through the keyboard rituals to get a “jolt” —a psychological reward— just as a laboratory rat will push a button to get a food pellet.

The jolt may be the opening of a window on the computer monitor, or seeing your own name in someone else’s message, or reading an angry, hostile message that rejects every value you hold dear. In any case, it’s an emotional payoff for going through the ritual, and it clearly appeals to a lot of people. Like any other such reward, computer jolts can become dangerously addictive.

Most, however, prefer to limit their jolts to eavesdropping on others’ quarrels. These are the lurkers, the passive Internet users who like to watch other people get into punch-ups. When lurkers do begin posting messages, they often start with a plea for mercy; they know what they’re getting into.

More aggressive types don’t care. Once addicted, they soon need ever-stronger jolts. So they just wade in with all guns blazing, and they thrive on flame wars of mutual recrimination and insult. Flamers may look like mortal enemies, but they’re really like junkies who also deal drugs—they provide jolts for each other.

Smile When You Write That, Stranger
Still another problem is “register.” This means adapting your comments to the person and the circumstances. If a kindergarten teacher talks to you the same way she talks to your child, you’ll be resentful. If you talk too familiarly to your boss, you may soon be looking for another job. Using the wrong register is the basis of most sitcoms, but it’s not often funny online. That’s why many of us use emoticons to try to convey the register we’re trying for.

When you’re sitting at your computer, you’re totally private. But the messages you read and receive are totally public. This really complicates the register you should adopt. You feel private, as if you were sharing pillow talk with your spouse, but the whole world is watching. Your intimate message brays out over the world’s greatest public-address system, and soon you’re getting equally intimate messages that thousands of others can also read.

When I first began to study the flame problem in the early 1990s, I consoled myself that selfish, insensitive, addictively aggressive slobs would not last long. Like barbarous pioneers, they would give way to the schoolmarms and genteel pillars of society. The people who would really flourish in this new medium, I told myself, would be those who could see beyond the computer monitor to the real live person at the other end, and write their messages accordingly.

I was wrong. The slobs have poisoned most of the waterholes, creating no-go zones all over cyberspace. Worse yet, when some folks do try to set up a civilized online community, the slobs barge in and track mud on the floor. Uninterested in grown-up discussion and debate, they try to bring everyone down to their level. Giving insults, taking insults—it’s all jolts to them.

For those of us who really do want to bring civilization to the online wilderness, the options are few. Arguing with the slobs only gives them more jolts. Ignoring them sometimes goads them into even worse flames.
Better to set out clear house rules for acceptable behaviour, and then to turf out anyone who behaves badly—just as we would if someone crashed a party and started insulting our guests.

Naming Your Blog
Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog. He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit. Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles,...

Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog.

He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit.

Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles, like this one and Writing Fiction. When I started blogging avian flu, H5N1 was also pretty self-descriptive, but set slightly apart from other blogs that played variations on "bird flu," "avian influenza," and so on.

Without realizing what I was doing, I picked names that people tend to Google. Type "writing fiction" into Google Advanced search and my site comes up first out of a million hits. "Writing for the Web" is #7 out of 634,000. And "h5n1" is #5 out of 7,870,000 hits.

In a course blog, where only my students are likely to visit, I may use a flat-footed name or a cute one—in a course on storytelling for media, the blog is Raconteur. But I'm just as comfortable with a course blog named for the room the class meets in, like Cedar 224.

For a blog that I co-author with a teacher in China, the name is English Corner, a reference most Chinese students will understand because every campus and town has an "English corner" where students gather to practice their English on one another—and any native English speakers who wander by.

Now I'm getting interested in climate change, and recently started Homage to Arrhenius, an allusion to the Swedish scientist who first developed the theory about CO² as a greenhouse gas, back in the 1890s. This may be a little too cute.

And for another blog, created as a journal for the second edition of one of my books, I've chosen the flat-footed name Pioneers...since the book is titled Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.

I'd be curious to know how bloggers visiting here chose the names for their sites. And can you point to any blogs that are either very well named, or horribly misnamed?

Good Manners? On the Web?
Via the New York Times: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. Excerpt: Is it too late to bring civility to the Web? The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse. Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a...

Via the New York Times: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. Excerpt:

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com).

Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself. “If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

Yes, it's extremely nasty out there. I've been lucky, in my own blogging, to escape the kind of behaviour described in the Times article. But I don't know how effective a "code of conduct" would be. What's your opinion—especially if you live outside North America?

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Housekeeping
Spam has become such a nuisance that I've had to require TypeKey authentication for comments. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Spam has become such a nuisance that I've had to require TypeKey authentication for comments. I apologize for the inconvenience.