This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Does A Blogger's Code of Conduct Introduce Liability? Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

Tim O'Reilly proposes a blogger's code of conduct. It sounds like a potential slippery slope to widespread blog censorship, but I also have questions about how the initiative might open the door to legal liabilities for adopters, by solidifying their status as publishers of the comments that appear on their blog. A publisher is a person or entity that has exercised control over content and dissemination of the defamatory statement.

Does adopting the code of conduct imply active policing of comment activity by site owners? If so, it appears to be an additional burden of responsibility. Does adoption of the code impact legal protection set by cases such as Cubby vs. Compuserve? Is O'Reilly unwittingly opening the door to a wider array of legal hostilities in the blogsphere? Does the Stratton Oakmont vs. Prodigy case apply?

the court found that Prodigy was liable for the content that they did not author. Prodigy was held accountable because they had promised that they would preview all material before it was posted.

Perhaps these legal cases are irrelevant, since they involve the online service provider rather than bloggers themselves and either way, I fail to see how bloggers aren't the publishers of their own blogs under the current status quo, anyway, which perhaps makes the bloggers code of conduct completely orthogonal to legal liabilities.

Updated: There's no way of permalinking directly to it, but Kathy Sierra's reply to Tim's post was insightful IMO:

This Code of Conduct would have had no effect on what happened to me. I had a comment policy in place, and deleted the threats that came directly to my blog. But if people are determined to hate, harass, intimidate, or threaten you, it's easy enough to do on other blogs.

I do think that people should be able to have their own comment policy with impunity--I've had one clearly stated for the last 6 months--but anyone who would support a code of conduct doesn't *need* one, and anyone who we *wish* would adopt it never would.

I have absolutely no faith that anything can be improved. People have become too desensitized and accepting. Worse, way too many people encourage the worst of it. The thousands of emails I've gotten since this happened paint a very depressing story. I've been nothing but optimistic for the last two years of my blog, but I was wrong. I'm glad people are having this conversation, but the more I hear... the more it appears that there is only one solution -- the one I've been hearing the most -- "grow a pair."