Three stories on Dozier Internet Law. In both cases I won’t link to any Dozier properties, per their terms of use. (I apologize for the inconvenience this might case.)
The first is to note that Dozier has a new spam (bulk marketing) website out, hosted by Vator.tv. The lack of originality is striking, even for an online properties. At random, I chose one of the lines of text from the page:
company in 1994, when there were reportedly less than 1,000 websites in the
searched for it in quotes, and sure enough, came back from a google for Dozier’s homepage.
The second story consists of John Dozier’s latest blog post. As Greg of Public Citizen commented privately to me, John must really hate bloggers. Here’s an excerpt from his post:
[Journalists] are being lumped in with the bloggers in legislation before Congress that would create a bar to requiring the disclosure of confidential sources. And the bill is likely to fail, frankly, based on the inability of the journalists to explain to Congress how to draw a line between real journalists and the blogosphere. On the one hand, Congress is ready to protect confidential sources for journalists. On the other hand, extending such a privilege to the blogosphere (which by definition includes the mobosphere of miscreants and scofflaws) is unpalatable to Congress….
Why is including bloggers such a big deal? Because bloggers will publish information that is defamatory or otherwise inappropriate or illegal, and do so with claimed false attribution to a third party, and then claim privilege when asked the source. Check out the Dozier Internet Law Blogger Defamation Issues for more insight on blogger defamation.
Certainly John’s concern about innacurate journalism is valid — regardless of the medium. Just last night, TMZ broke another story of deceptive reporting by CNN. And I imagine that I would disagree with Greg of PubCit about how much legal protection reporters should have in protecting sources. Still, I am wondering what definition of the blogosphere he is using…
The last story is inspired by a pre-posting discussion I had with Brendan of I Hate Linux. I gave Brendan the link to the Dozier blog post, and he replied that I may be violating Dozier’s term of use by even privately sharing the link. I answered that I wasn’t sure. So John Dozier… may people mention the URLs of your posts to each other in private, or is that discouraged, too?
