The Globe and Mail's Matthew Ingram rounds up some of the main lawsuits against Canadian bloggers. However, the risk isn't just in what the blogger says, but in what is said in comments on the blog itself.
University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist says Canadian bloggers need to be aware that by effectively becoming publishers, they are subject to the laws on defamation and libel.
Those laws "apply online as well as off-line," he says. "Just because bloggers have the ability to write whatever they want doesn't give them licence to defame anyone."
Ironically, some of those who sue bloggers for libel wind up compounding the problem by giving the blogs in question even more publicity.
This is sometimes known as the "Streisand Effect," after an incident in which the singer tried to have photos of her house removed from a website, but only succeeded in getting more people to view them.
"If he had just let it die, then people would've forgotten about it," Hand says of his fellow gallery owner. "My blog only gets a couple of hundred readers." Because of the attention the suit has created, however, his blog is now among the top links in Google for the individual's name.
Geist says there are likely to be more lawsuits against bloggers as blogs become more mainstream.
"It certainly feels like we're seeing more of these cases, and it probably reflects the fact that there are more people blogging," he says. "And at the same time, people are increasingly realizing that blogs have an impact and that more people are reading them."
Geist says he is also concerned that suits are increasingly being filed not just because of what a blogger says in a post, but because of what is said in comments by visitors to blogs.
While third parties are protected from such suits in the United States by the Communications Decency Act, Canada has no such protection, he says, and that raises "a significant threat of 'libel chill.'"
In an ongoing case involving several Canadian bloggers, a man named Wayne Crookes has sent letters warning not just those who make negative comments about him, but anyone who even links to a blog that contains such comments. He has already sued the Wikipedia site, as well as Google.
For those reasons (and for spam control), I read peoples' comments before posting them to the site -- easy enough to do, as I'm hardly inundated with them. :)
However, I will say that anonymous nasty personal attacks on individuals are just not on here.
But in my travels through the Canadian blogosphere, it would seem the blogs that attract the most commenters are often the nastiest, and they tend to draw like-minded commenters. If I were to draw up a list of bloggers likely to be sued, I would start with them.
And if they were successfully sued, I wouldn't necessarily feel badly for them.
On the larger issues of blogs and lawsuits, some of this stuff needs to be tested in court.
A big question would be the issue of damages. If an individual post did contain defamatory material, but was only read by a couple dozen people, then what kind of damages could a plaintiff legitimately expect the court to order?
If one of those people reading it is a journalist with a mainstream who then amplifies the defamatory material by publishing or broadcasting it, who should be held liable for the effects of that, the blogger or the mainstream news outlet?
Similarly, if a comment has a link in it, and that link points to some defamatory material, but only a few people are shown to have clicked through from the comment, how much damage can the blogger who allowed the link to be posted be held responsible for?
I have more questions than answers on these points.