September 11, 2009 by Trent Morgan
Firstly let me state that I am not a legal professional, I have no training in law whatsoever. What I am about to give you is a response to the above, based on my understanding, which in no way constitutes legal advice…
Right, now that I’ve covered my back, let me begin. As far as libel (that’s written defamation as opposed to verbal) goes, the rules for blog posts (and subsequent comments from that original poster) are the same as if it were a newspaper article. Basically, with blogs, online libel is still libel.
As far as I can tell, however, defamation in comments from third parties is a legal grey area. There is some debate within the legal community about whether comment board libel can be blamed on the sites themselves or whether, it constitutes libel at all. There was a very interesting judgement in the US last year on this subject where a judge in an online defamation case ruled that defamation on message boards was closer to slander than libel, stating in his remarks,
“[Bulletin board posts] are rather like contributions to a casual conversation, which people simply note before moving on; they are often uninhibited, casual and ill thought out…Those who participate know this and expect a certain amount of repartee or ‘give and take’.” – Mr Justice Eady.
Nevertheless you don’t want to have defamation of any kind on your site, so best to keep firm control of your blog comments and stamp out anything nasty as soon as it arises.
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