• by Shankar Gupta , June 16, 2005

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, recently issued a set of guidelines detailing the legal issues facing bloggers. The offering, "Legal Guide for Bloggers," addresses issues such as libel law, copyright law, and political advocacy, according to the EFF's Web site.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney for the EFF, said the foundation drafted the guide in response to a handful of instances in which bloggers found themselves in trouble based on what they had written on the Web.

"There were a lot of issues coming up in the news that seemed to suggest that some guidelines and FAQs would be very helpful to the blogging community to understand their rights, and if necessary, defend them," said Opsahl. "Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and citizen bloggers who are out there expressing their thoughts are a vital and important part of that debate."

The point of the guide, Opsahl said, is not to scare bloggers into silence with dire warnings about legal liabilities, but instead to arm them with the knowledge of how to defend their rights. "We don't want to stop people from blogging. We're not trying to convince people to be very cautious or not publish any controversial content, but to know what their rights are," he said. "We want to let them know that they have rights, and blog freely with the knowledge of what speech is protected."

The EFF isn't the only organization to issue written blogging guidelines. The U.S. military also recently released blogging guidelines for troops. In April, Lieutenant General John Vines, a commanding officer in Iraq, issued a memo laying down rules for the hundreds of military bloggers who are stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The memo requires military bloggers to register their sites' URLs with their units, and forbids bloggers from revealing classified or prohibited information, on threat of prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.