Understanding The Legal Issues Of Blogging

Blogging in today’s world is considered to be one of the most effective tools particularly in the Business domain. There happened to be a period when the element of blogging was only considered to be an area of expressing ones emotions, creativity etc., but the present picture is totally different. Blogs even have the power to rev up the stature of an organization and at the same time can also turn out to be the reason of downfall. Now with such an upsurge in the blogging world, there are certain legal issues related to this which should be understood and known. This article would definitely give an outset of the legal issues concerned with blogging so that you can have a brief idea of how to protect your blogs and also yourself if you violate any elements via your blogs.

Knowing the Disclosure Policy

Going back a few years i.e. before 2009, you wouldn’t have faced any problems if you supported or promoted a company, product, service etc., by highlighting any link but since December 2009, the advent of the blog disclosure policy has restricted the usage of links anywhere in your blog. Which means none of your blogs should have rather should not disclose any relationship with other products or services. Therefore if you ever plan to start a review blog which highlights the different pros and cons of products or services then it would be very important for you to publish a disclosure policy page in your blog so that no legal problem arises.

Copyright Contravention

Plagiarism is one important aspect that should be taken care with utmost interest. You will never have the right of copying any material from the net. Nowadays almost all unique materials published in the web has a copyright certificate which clearly depicts that the usage of it in any place without the required permission is liable to be punished under the law. Therefore usage of content from any other sources is strictly prohibited. To ensure that the contents which you are posting in your blog are plagiarism free – you can take the help of various plagiarism checking tools available online. Once you get a dupe-free result you can upload the content with ease and feel confident about the fact that you won’t be hassled by any lawsuits.

There are also copyright contraventions regarding images and videos too. Whenever you are uploading any image content or video content onto your blog, make sure that you get the required permissions as most of the pictures or videos are copyrighted. Keep your blog plagiarism free so that you have a safe distance from any lawsuits.

Online Defamation through blogs

Defamation is another very serious aspect that gives rise to various court cases. In most of the situations it is seen that the bloggers publish certain catchy content defaming any product or service or even any person so that the traffic is directed to their blog. Publishing information which is not true can be considered as a criminal offence and a lawsuit can be easily filed. Thus promoting or uploading any content which is irrelevant and is directly defaming anyone should be strictly condemned. Be sure to post only that content against which you have enough proof so that if anything happens you can defend yourselves.

Corporate level blogging

Amongst the various effective tools of Marketing, the element of blogging has slowly and steadily crept its way amongst the big league and now is one of the most effective tools for marketing a product, service, company or organization. The above aspect that has been discussed is equally applicable in the aspect of corporate level blogging too. Like you need to give a disclaimer policy if you wish to refer to any link in your blog; similarly you will have to do the same in your corporate site so that there is no chance of getting into any legal problems; same is the case with privacy invasion and defamation. You will have to make sure that while blogging on behalf of any company you don’t post any sort of content that directly or indirectly harms the reputation of any other element. Also, the other thing that should be taken into consideration is that the blog content should not reveal any kind of confidential reports or information. When found guilty – the blog owner or even the whole company may face several lawsuits.

Thus training is the best solution to avoid any such divergences. If each blogger knows about these simple elements and works accordingly, then there would be no chances of engaging into any sort of lawsuits anytime. Blogging is definitely one of the best modern trends but only if followed in the right path by abiding all the laws.