-By Warner Todd Huston
What is the ages old misconstruction of Shakespeare? “First kill all the lawyers.” Well, one might excuse bloggers if they might wish to add the officers of the courts to that death sentence, at least if the experience of the bloggers at New York’s “Room 8” blog are concerned.
For Ben Smith and his fellow “Room 8” bloggers, the world got a bit topsy-turvey not long ago when he was served with a grand jury subpoena by state prosecutors demanding that the identities of anonymous posters on his website be revealed.
Worse, the court wouldn’t inform Mr. Smith exactly why they wanted the identities of several posters and what they would do with the information once they got it.
Smith’s subpoena got retracted and the identities weren’t needed after some legal wrangling, but incidents like this are beginning to occur more and more. Bloggers are running up against the law with increasing frequency in the US and the world. Of course, for much of the world’s bloggers, their blogging is landing them in jail to be tortured by oppressive regimes like China and the like, but bloggers are also finding their work under question in the free world, too.
It’s still the wild west as far as the law is concerned with blogging. Blogs haven’t been around long enough for the law to have settled on what to do with them, what rights bloggers have or don’t have, and what they can or cannot do. The status blogs have in the eyes of the law is still incredibly amorphous. Are bloggers journalists? Should they get the same protections as newspapers? Are they entirely private communications? Should they be held to exactly the same libel laws as other media? And, where do anonymous bloggers stand? Should they be forced to reveal their identities? How about commenters on blogs? Should they be forced to publicly declare their identities? Is their privacy somehow perfectly secure?
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