I’ve often wondered about blogging and the law, and even before that, the balance of privacy and security in our age of technology and pervasive, ubiquitous information. For this post, I’ll stick with personal and business blogging and their legal implications.
Personal Blogging All my blogging is business blogging, but I do share some of my personal experiences and opinions on them - its hard not to. When I write about food, I write about the food that I have eaten. When I write about travel, I write about where I have personally traveled to, when I blog about current events, I share my opinions of the world.
So are there any legal implications here? Absolutely! Note, I am not a lawyer, and I don’t even play one on TV! But as someone who has been exposed to The Law, I’ve learned a little bit about legal risk. By blogging, bloggers create evidence, and that can potentially be used against them in a variety of ways, but like any “log” or accounting of events, it can also help bring clarity of past circumstances. Conversations are different, they happen, and they are gone. While they can help people understand a current situation, unless they are recorded, they are gone from existence afterwards, and remain only as memories. Memories can be testified to, but they can also be forgotten.
So why take the risk? I, for one, believe in accuracy, realism, and writing things down in general. It helps me, and hopefully others, understand things better. I believe that it will ultimately be worth the risk.
Business Blogging Business blogging comes with evidence risk as well, but it can also have more substantial financial risk, simply because businesses often have more exposure and money than individuals. Businesses face many dangers in this regard, and that is really beyond my level of expertise in law or business, so I’ll have to limit my examination to that.
It is really interesting to think about - publishing and the written word have come a long way, and I’m excited to see how personal and business blogging will evolve. I appreciate why there are legal risks to both endeavors, but I hope that the risks do not stifle innovation, and I suspect it will not.
Blog on!
