The Legal Status of Group Blogs... (sigh) at Law & Society Blog

The Legal Status of Group Blogs… (sigh)

Published by Hanno Kaiser January 24th, 2006 in Law and Society

Is a group blog a partnership? A corporation? An LLC? Do we really need governing documents before we share some thoughts with the world? And trademarks? And copyrights so that no one appropriates our precious thoughts without prior (presumably written) approval? C’mon! This post on Truth in the Market is a good example of property fundamentalism run amok and how overlawyering gets in the way of just having fun. Unless you want to make money with your blog, why not simply license all content under a creative commons (non-commercial) attribution license and be done with it?

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4 Responses to “The Legal Status of Group Blogs… (sigh)”

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1 Manfred Gabriel Jan 24th, 2006 at 2:47 pm

I guess it was only a matter of time…

The fundamental issue, of course, is whether in blogging we are doing something new and different that is meant to change the way we communicate and use ideas, or the same old thing, just in a different medium.

To my mind blogging is something very different from disseminating thought through print media and the concomitant middle-men, like publishers and bookseller. Blogging is more than a new medium. The traditional notions of intellectual “property” and legal formalism are to some extent antithetical to the unmediated,immediate, and informal exchange of ideas that blogging represent.
2 Bill Sjostrom Jan 24th, 2006 at 5:16 pm

Why exactly would it be overlawyering for business law professors to address the business law issues associated with their blogging? How is this “property fundamentalism run amok?”
3 Gary Rosin May 5th, 2006 at 11:22 am

I agree with Bill Sjostrom.

By nature, law professors, particularly those interested in the laws governing associations of various sorts, wonder about the nature of the relationships growing out of group activity. The reporters are full of cases where people drifted into a relationship without having the “what are we doing?” discussion. Often, they wake up one morning, and someone says “Morning, partner!”

What about liability in tort for the wrongful acts of another co-blogger? Libel, plagiarism and copyright infringement spring to mind.

Without a profit motive, it would be hard to classify the relationship as a business partnership. But how about the venerable doctrine of “joint adventure”? Traditionally, that requires only a common purpose. I know that some states have begun to require a common pecuniary purpose, but I don’t know how widespread that is.

Gary Rosin
South Texas College of Law