Talk About Local unconference 2010: Legal issues discussion
The first session I went to at yesterday’s Talk About Local un-conference was on the legal problems of managing sites that allow user feedback or investigate stories of public interest.
It’s very depressing to hear of the crippling situations people repeatedly find themselves in, simply through a determination to get at the truth in the face of power and wealth that’s determined to stop them. The heartening bit I suppose is that sometimes there are also powerful people prepared to join in the fight.
Problems faced by people in the room had included: unfounded but effective demands to have comments removed from websites; moral dilemmas about balancing legal rights to publish with social implications for individuals; threats of crippling legal action.
Some tips from the room
- Make interaction/commenting guidelines clearer
- Always check your story with more than one source
- Consider remove first-post moderation: if you moderate comments you are legally responsible for their content. Instead add a ‘report this comment’ button and ensure you have a tight take-down policy
- Don’t hold the website in your own name but set up a limited company, so that you’re only liable for the amount that the company is worth. However you must make sure that all content is transferrable to other websites and under your personal control.
- Ensure you have clear terms and conditions are on your site, and review them regularly.
- Ignore the majority of threatening letters from lawyers: most of them are just trying to scare you.
Please remember:
This post is a report of information from other people at a conference. Therefore I may unintentionally have misunderstood or misrepresented what I heard. Please do not treat anything here as fact: check with a reliable source before, say, putting yourself in danger of defending a libel case.
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