Blog Law Guy

I’ve just started following this story.  I don’t know all the facts, and I don’t like to jump to conclusions, but based on what I do know, I have to agree solidly with attorney Sean Conway in this dispute.

The Florida Bar seems totally out of line here.  Trying to infringe upon Mr. Conway’s First Amendment rights is definitely not the kind of activity in which a state bar ought to be engaged.

Over at Blawg-IT, Brett Trout offers some helpful pointers for protecting your blog’s intellectual property.

In this brief, but quite helpful, blog entry, Nina Kaufman introduces some helpful online resources about the legal risks that accompany blogging and using social media or Web 2.0. 

If you’re like an increasing number of bloggers, you may be finding that some of your content is being “scraped” or lifted and displayed on other sites, without your permission, without a link back to your blog, and without any attribution to you whatsoever.  In many, if not most, cases, such actions constitute at least plagiarism and at worst plagiarism and copyright infringement.

At his excellent blog, Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey explains how to find the policies of major advertising networks concerning the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and how to work with those companies to file complaints and have your content removed from various sites.

While you are there, I recommend that you spend some time at the blog and add it to your newsfeed aggregator and reader.  Plagiarism Today contains a wealth of information that will help you protect your online content from authorized use and reproduction.

Pete Ashton asks that question as he points to a paper by Paul Bradshaw.  The paper doesn’t explore the legal issues in any depth, but it does mention copyright as a concern.

Unauthorized enjoyment of song irks law firm

“CNET News - It sounds like the setup for a joke: a law firm picks a fight with a legal blogger over the leak of … instance of corporate self-congratulation has turned into a minor Internet … asserted that posting the song had been a violation of the firm’s copyright …”

So I may as well start here. Welcome to Blog Law Guy, a blog providing news and information about the legal issues that arise from blogging. I hope you will enjoy the site. Please visit often and feel free to comment on the topics that interest you.