Funferal

Libel liability and weblogs

There has, unsurprisingly, been a certain amount of coverage of the Wired news story that claimed that a recent court case absolves bloggers from exposure to libel. While some have pointed out that the case didn’t directly refer to weblogs I think that much of the coverage is glossing over an important implication of the story.
As has been pointed out, the basis of the argument in the case (which involved a mailing list archived on the web) was that the poster essentially used the source data/link in good faith, and that the mailing list (or weblog in a hypothetical future case) was not expected to undertake the level of fact-checking of a professional news outlet. Leaving aside, for one moment, the fact that the precedent (such a it is) is US-centric (that is, it is based on American libel law, and would have no legal implication outside of the US) the case changes how weblogs are framed.
Some commentators have posited that weblogs will replace traditional media outlets as news sources. However, this case (if extended to weblogs) and the coverage of it, explicitly cast weblogs in a different light. Not only are weblogs recognised as being produced on a small-scale, voluntary, basis, but they are seen as qualitatively different from news media. This is not necessarily a bad thing, or unfair, but it does cast weblogs as forums for public discussion rather than media that attempt to provide a coherent world view to readers/viewers. This also implies that the role of the traditional media is seen as separate from this public discussion function, more geared toward socialising people through this ‘coherent world view’ function.