Following up on Nick Denton’s call for a bloggers’ ethics committee, Jeff Jarvis says bloggers don’t need a committee because they are “ruled by the wisdom of the crowd,” adding that the rules of ethics in publishing are simple: be open, transparent and honest. He lists a few others here. “You need to follow the law — whether you like the law or not — regarding copyright and trademark and if you don’t, that’s your risk.”
In a separate post, he says bloggers do need a Legal Defense Society, “so a blogger who’s getting harassed by big corporate or government attorneys can call for help,” and asks a few good blogging lawyers to step forward.
On a related note, Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at U.C.L.A. who writes the Volokh Conspiracy blog, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week arguing that bloggers deserve the same first amendment protections as the press.
