Today the Guardian has taken a look at the legal status of bloggers in the wake of the Apple court battle.
But there's some other legal wranglings going on that could affect bloggers... Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst is taking action against sites - including Nick Denton's famed Gawker gossip blog - for posting a stolen sex video of him. Here's the New York Daily News, for what it's worth:
Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst struck back at the Web sites that posted X-rated video clips of him romping with an ex-girlfriend with an $80 million lawsuit yesterday.
"The Video was never intended by either participant to be shown," the lawsuit states.
Durst, who explained in court papers how he "held the camera," said computer hackers stole the video from his hard drive and posted it without his permission.
Gawker seems to have recognised that it was a poor show to post the video itself - they took it down pretty damn quickly, and before they received any legal notice from Durst's lawyers. Now they're taking the defensive line:
Honestly, though, we don't know why you're so mad at us. The situation is really rather simple. Someone sent us a link to a video of your penis, we went into shock, and we shared it with the world for about 2 hours. Then we wept, found God, took a hot bath, and removed the video from our site.
Journalist and blogger Felix Salmon published a long diatribe saying that Gawker jumped the shark when it hosted the video rather than just linking to it. He blames Nick Denton for the posting, which he says reflects the site's increasing tabloidisation - going from being a media gossip site to being a celebrity gossip site:
Wwhen a video appeared today featuring Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst having very explicit sex with an unidentified girl, Gawker was more than happy to link to that... so long as you're a celebrity, there's nothing that Gawker won't link to.
The real shark-jumping, however, came later in the day, when Gawker decided to host the video themselves. Anybody going to Gawker's Fred Durst Sex Tape page was immediately confronted with the full two-minute video, and quite possibly put off their dinner for the rest of the day. The irony is that the title of the page was "The Fred Durst Sex Tape You Never Wanted" – well, if you went to that page, you got it whether you wanted it or not.
Privacy is, of course, an eternal celebrity news question. But this time it could be a big deal for bloggers as a wider group of publishers - especially since internet law is so flaky most of the time, and when it does make a decision it is often incorrect or badly applied.
