I am not a lawyer, and I don’t particularly think of my blog as a law-blog, however, I do cover legal issues from time to time. People interested in my posts about legal issues are encouraged to read the law section of Orient Lodge, or subscribe to the RSS feed of the law section.

With that, there are several interesting issues that have recently come up that I would like to highlight. First, the Valley Independent Sentinel has an article about user comments triggering a Derby lawsuit. According to the article, Renee Luneau is suing Ken Hughes and Christopher Bigelow alleging that they “failed to make a reasonable and proper safeguards (sic) to prevent defamatory comments from being published on website known as ctlocalpolitics.net”. The article goes into a little detail about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which seems like a pretty solid defense in this case. One person commented about how the recent lawsuit to get Google to reveal who has written anonymous blog posts may change this, but I think that is mixing up issues and I went into details about why in a comment, which I encourage you to stop by the Valley Independent Sentinel to read the comments.

While the case appears to have no merit, Ken Hughes and Christopher Bigelow are likely to incur legal fees defending themselves. This leads me to the next issue. On Tuesday, Pam Spaulding put up an important blog post entitled Hanging citizen journalists out to dry: shield-law amendment excludes unpaid bloggers. The fact that bloggers and citizen journalists may not get paid is no excuse for excluding them from laws that protect other journalists. As we have seen, unpaid bloggers can run into the same legal issues and traditional journalists and need similar protection.

Bloomberg goes into another aspect of the protections that citizen journalists and bloggers need to consider, media liability insurance. This is another expense for serious bloggers and citizen journalists, which can be particularly expensive for unpaid bloggers. However, not having this sort of coverage could be even more expensive.

In other legal news, a new book out about the Cheshire triple murder is stirring up all kinds of issues. The New Haven Register quotes a defense attorney describing it as "scurrilous trash". The article notes that the lawyers “served notice they intend to seek an arrest warrant against Komisarjevsky for contempt of court for violating the court-imposed gag order -- if McDonald’s ‘public statements can be relied upon.’” People in the comments section have noted that to a person facing the death penalty, being found in contempt of court is unlikely to have much of an affect.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice has just upgraded their website. You can follow the DOJ on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube, as well as sign up for all kinds of different messages from the DOJ. I signed up and am getting a lot of messages from the FBI right now. I’ll probably cut back on some of the feeds I’ve subscribed to. Otherwise, it could be overwhelming.

In the pipeline, I received another brief on the Doninger case, which I expect will be heard in the Second Circuit before too long. In addition, I’m keeping my eyes open for developments in the Citizen’s Election Program case. That provides a brief update on some of the legal issues I’m currently watching. I do wish more bloggers would cover legal issues, and I think the DOJ updates could be a very valuable tool for bloggers and citizen journalists.