Tim O'Reilly's well-intentioned Blogger Code of Conduct is an attempt to come up with a voluntary set of behavioural norms that will keep blogs civil and honest. However, I was very uncomfortable with Tim's draft, as it seemed to preclude real anonymity and invite censorship. Journalist Tristan Louis has posted a very good "dissection" of Tim's draft in which he thinks through a lot of the objections I had, setting them down better than I could. This is a very good paper on the tension between "civility" and "freedom."
"- [We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:] is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,"
Libelous is a word with a lot of legal weight to it. This opens up a whole set of legal issues around how people talk online. The appearance of falseness can be enough to trigger a lawsuit (but not enough to win) and this portion seems to also fly in the face of a lot of established law (Zeran v American Online, for example). Another question about this section is “knowingly false”: to whom? to the owner of the blog? to the writer of the comment? to the person the comment is made about? to other parties?
"- infringes upon a copyright or trademark"
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, O’Reilly, AOL, etc… are all trademarks. I have not put a TM after every single one of those trademarks in posts I write on TNL.net, which technically makes me in violation of this effort, from a trademark standpoint.
For the purpose of this post, I am quoting the substantial majority of the post by tim O’Reilly, which would technically put me in violation of his copyright. However, Tim has a Creative Commons License so he’s granting me some rights. Unfortunately, the rights granted by the CC license also say that you can’t reuse the content for commercial purpose: I run adsense ads on this site, which could be considered a commercial effort so, as such, I would technically be in violation of Tim’s copyright AND CC license. Under the terms of this, quoting substantial portion of copyrighted content would be a violation of the code. This means that blogs now have a choice: write only original content without extensive quoting or don’t run ads. It’s a tough choice for many bloggers.
(via Smart Mobs)
