The other side of the professional blogging coin is looking at the business ramification of making money with your blogging. This session will cover the things to consider and that you may regret if you wait to long to address: copyright protection, tax ramifications, managing personal vs. paid-for blogging, your site policies, and blogging ethics.

Here are my top ten legal issues pertinent to this discussion; what are yours?

1. Communications policies (your own, or someone else's which may apply)

2. Intellectual property (your own and third parties')

3. Indirect liability for third party acts

4. Civility

5. Ethics

6. Privacy

7. E-commerce

8. Data ownership, responsibilities

9. Minors

10. Special considerations for regulated businesses/industries

• Defining community and loosely-joined individuals and interest groups
• Community goals and governance (or lack thereof)
• External innovation communities such as Procter & Gamble's and ownership issues
• Intellectual and liability concerns for company-owned or associated communities
• Whether an initiative similar to the Creative Commons movement has or is in the process of emerging
• Ownership issues and risk-minimization around products or services that emerge from external ideas
• Variations on open source licenses
• Individual rights and protections for community contributors and participants
• Anonymity and accountability
• Nefarious community exploitation: gaming, hacking, spamming
• Trust and reputation management
• The use of trademark law to use and manage community involvement; selective enforcement, the expansion of certification marks
• Insurance industry mechanisms and models
• Defamation
• Company-sponsored (and owned) communities, and the actions taken by participants who find the terms and conditions of such initiatives too draconian
• "Innovator's dilemma" management and patent strategy and the tension between old, successful products and those developed with help from outsourced customer communities
• Personal data ownership and the Attention Trust

In connection with our session at the the upcoming Community 2.0 conference, law professor Mike Madison and I will be hosting a public conference call on Monday, February 26 beginning at 1:00 p.m. PST, and we'd love your participation to help us hone in on the ownership considerations (IP; attention; identity), and issues of governance and liability, most critical to the creation, maintenance, and long-term health of business communities.  The call will be recorded and made available as a podcast from The Future of Communities blog.  You can join us as follows:

From Skype: +990008275785861

From a regular phone (long distance costs apply):
US: 1-605-475-8590

In Europe, call:
Germany 01805 00 7620
UK 0870 738 0763

The Conference Room Number: 5785861

Hope to chat with you then.

(Cross-posted to Bag and Baggage and Lawgarithms) 

[Update, Monday 2/26 @ 1:15 p.m.:] Unfortunately, we had problems with the conferencing service lined up to support this, so are having to reschedule. I'll post the new date, time, and call-in details once they're available, sorry for the delay.

#1 know and follow bar association guidelines for conduct, as well as the rules of good legal writing. no need to use Blue Book citations, but be accurate in your posts: others will look to them as a source of information and news, if not actual research.

#2 be mindful of what you write. remember that you have an audience.

#3 identify yourself and write in first person. make it clear that you are not necessarily speaking for the bar association as a whole. be sure to disclose any information necessary to keep your statements from being misleading. use the following disclaimer on your blog or wiki with respect to all posts:

#4 respect copyright and fair use. do not plagiarize. give credit where due by citing to the author of a statement or passage.

#5 do not reveal confidential information that could result in liability to yourself, your committee, other bar association members, or the bar association itself.

#6 do not comment on active cases or client matters by name except with the approval of those referred to in the post.

#7 do not use ethnic slurs, insults, or obscenity. Avoid writing about inflammatory topics solely to pique prurient interests.

#8 always try to add to a discussion constructively and ultimately to add value. do not let your ego get in the way. you are here for the good of the bar association after all.

#9 have fun. a blog or wiki can be loads of fun and a terrific way to share the best of your committee with the world.

But for those in the military, as is true of so much they do, their online activities take place in an environment of uncertainty and danger. As the Jacksonville Daily News reports, though use of tools like MySpace is increasingly common, "DoD does not currently have a specific 'blogging' policy." This can leave soldiers like Matt Austin and his family and friends wondering what exactly has led to the curtailing of activities that provide a thin yet powerful lifeline home.

Also, here's Tom Keating's rundown of the referenced June '06 survey: "2006 Proofpoint Survey Finds that 7.1% of Large US Companies Fired Employees for Blogging and Message Board Infractions In Last 12 Months."

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz: "Our blogging policy is 'Be authentic. Period.'" (It's been awhile since I was showing up bright eyed and bushy tailed for Larry Sonsini's Securities Regs class in law school, but I'd be willing to bet Sun's securities lawyers might want a qualifier or two.)

Summer camps, with camper identities to protect and other considerations, might understandably go a different route. That article also highlights, and Dennis pointed out (by pointing here) on our mailing list, the camps' attempts to police bloggy uses of their trademarks. I'll have to defer to Marty on this but what they're concerned about sounds like nominative fair use.

Weiner adds that “Unsanctioned corporate blogging is absolutely a tough call. And it happens in just about every organization.” Hmmm . . . "just about every organization," he says. I'd love to see the stats backing that assertion. In fairness, I'll note that I pulled the quotes from the overview article and suggest that people listen to the podcast of the interview of Weiner to get a fuller picture of his views.

Let me simply say that in "almost every organization" there probably is a corporate communication policy or Internet use policy already in place that comfortably covers blogging and bloggers. As we've mentioned many times on this blog, considering policies in a vacuum, or rushing in with standardized and ill-conceived "blogging policies" will be the recipe for making all hell break loose. Any reasonable approach to these issues involves a three-sided approach, reasonable policy, consistent enforcement and excellent training. Skimp on any of the three and you will have problems. Focus only on the "blogging policy" issue (especially without integrating the other aspects of corporate communications) and all hell may break loose.

We've covered the issue of "blogging policies" repeatedly and, we believe, reasonably on the Between Lawyers blog. It's sad to see that the hype and selling of corporate blogging policies continues unabated. For a very reasonable approach to this issue, see Denise's recent post "Blog in Peace." She doesn't talk about hell breaking loose even once in the post.

It'll be interested in seeing see if and how PodTech.Net implements Weiner's approach with Scoble, won't it? We'd certainly hate to see all hell break loose at PodTech.Net because of Scoble's blogging. I'm just noting the irony of the timing of this article and Scoble's move.

What might be quite useful to the blogging community at large would be for PodTech.Net and Scoble to share the "blogging policy" that will apply to Scoble so it might be analyzed and critiqued and possibly used as a model for companies taking progressive approaches to employee bloggers. Just a thought and an example of what we call open source lawyering might look like.