Legal Commentary

Bloggers Behaving Badly

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

It well could be a tempest in a teapot, but details as to what this is about can be found at Random Pixels and Loose Talk from Miami Beach, It’s our birthday … so time to lawyer up!, but basically these comments, produced a threat — so far, just a threat — of a lawsuit by one local blogger against another.

It may not have been wise, and certainly wasn’t polite, for Random Pixels to say

The reality is that Babalu is really nothing more than a fringe group of bomb-throwing, anthrax-mailing, loud-mouth fanatics gone high tech.

Impolitic, but I think and hope that were anyone foolish enough to bring suit a jury would have very little trouble finding this wasn’t an assertion of fact as to past acts, but rather a hyperbolic analogy. That’s certainly how I read it and how I think anyone reasonable would read it.

I hardly ever read Babalu as I have very little patience for monotonous bullies of any stripe. (I suppose I should admit that I read Random Pixels only a little more often, mostly via SFDB links.) But having bloggers sue each others over hyperbole would be very silly. Let’s hope sanity prevails.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on February 14, 2009 (boomark / email).