CyberMummy - CyberLabs: "You b****! What you can and can't say on your blog"

Hi Everyone, this post was written in real time and has now been edited so my lack of grammar, the spelling mistakes and all the other things that I do that are generally rubbish, have been corrected and the post generally tidied up! I have also added some info that I missed out and that Gayle very kindly added into the comments for me. Thanks everyone for bearing with me!

Gayle Trigg is a mummy blogger, Twitter-holic and a solicitor who specialises in Internet and data protection law (at commercial law firm Wragge & Co LLP none the less) gave an overview on legal and libel issues that you might find affect you and your blog!

Gayle Trigg on stage

Earlier in the day we had been told that controversial posts would bring traffic and possibly further exposure to you blog. Now controversial and personal blog posts are great, but what can you and can't you say? There are laws there to bring old world establishments in to this new world.

20,00 start a blog a day (apparently) this has benefits for us as bloggers, people sue people because they want to get damages for something that has been done, they aren't interested in getting money out of you or any other individual blogger (which is a good thing too, because I have about £2 to my name!). So if you are approached by someone and asked to remove something don't worry. They aren't going to be launching legal action, they want to protect their image.

Photos are subject to copyright. Every piece of original thought has copyright and without permission you can't copy it. This includes your blog so good news there! There are plenty of places to get photos under the creative commons license, and the images are numerous! All the images used in Gayle's talk had been sourced from places that had images available under the creative commons license.

Music also attracts copyright, just because a video is available on a site like YouTube, it doesn't mean it is legally available. Record industry do take notice of this time to time. Take down notices are sometimes legally questionable and just because someone says to take something down, you don't have to. Take a look before you do take it down to check if you do have permission first.

Libel reform is going to be coming, in part because of the Internet and this will be a good thing.

A lot of bloggers forget that Twitter is also a place where defamatory comments can take place. Twitter is a micro blogging site, everything that you type is published; So treat Twitter as you would a blog post!

So what if you have said something on your blog that is true, but a company or person have asked you to remove the post or part of the post because they say it isn't? The first thing to check is have you said something that is true. It is up to you to prove it is.

Of course you could say something that is your own view of a fact, that is a fair comment. What you can't say it that you thought it was true. You have to make sure of your facts first, which can be problematic, but is something that we should all check before we start blogging away!

As yourself "would any fair man..come to this opinion based on those facts" and if this rings true then you should be okay with what you have written. Of course if what you are writing is in public interest then it changes things.

All comments are responsible by the blog owner on the blog, but you can sometimes by saying that you are a host and don't take control of them that you aren't moderating and editing comments that you weren't aware there was an issue, but this is really for bigger companies that don't have anything to do with the comments on their site (unlike me where I read and reply to everyone!).

For most blogs, the standard rule of prevention is better than cure stands true. You are better off reserving the right to reject comments or edit them if you consider them inappropriate, in order to avoid the issue arising in the first place (Which I totally do!).

Do take things seriously if you are asked to remove something but don't think that it is the end of the world. Can you offer a right to reply, can you edit what was said? Courts don't want us to go to court, they want us to sort things happily ourselves and so would prefer that we checked for a solution first!

With regards to competitions, if it is a free give away it is fine. If you require a payment then you can't do this as it is part of the gambling act. And of course you have to be careful with all the data that you collect during the competition as this is all part of data protection. If you have peoples information from competitions you need to be careful with what you do with it and how it is handled. You need to let people know if you intend to pass it on and let them opt out from this.

And one last piece of advice; don't click send when your angry!