I thought I'd share what I've found about a blog's terms and conditions, privacy, and disclaimers. I'm not a lawyer, so don't use this for your own blog.

I haven't blogged for a couple of years and I wanted to get up to date on legal issues to do with running a blog. Basically, I wanted to protect my blog from being used maliciously, protect myself from unwanted liabilities, and not get bogged down in multi-page small print disclaimers.

So I just spent a week or two idly going through google looking for ideas. Some things were immediately apparent:

1. US law still predominates any advice you might read.
2. You probably do need to have something written down for users on the terms and conditions of using a blog; you should protect yourself with a disclaimer; and in my jurisdiction I should have something on privacy as well.
3. Legal ideas have changed and some laws have been fine-tuned for the web. In general, they are still pretty unclear though.

First, US law predominates google, not surprisingly. It may not apply specifically to me, but there is still plenty of good general advice. European law seems to be very specific and quite rigourous, so I didn't read much of it since I know it doesn't apply in Australia.

Still, I keep in mind that a blog can be read by anyone anywhere, so I try to generally be a good neighbour without getting too caught up in disclaimers and caveats.

Second, blogging in general still hasn't caught up with legal issues on copyright and liablity, although it is getting better. That probably comes from the historical anarchic nature of the web where anything goes. It's a good thing to protect yourself from some of the anarchism. By protect, I mean "able to use your blog for what you want", not just protect from liability.

For example, one surprising thing is that someone who posts a comment retains copyright over their work. This opens some issues such as "am I able to even display their comment", and that "I must comply with their request to remove their copyrighted work whenever they ask". Could be painful if you get an annoying commenter who's making trouble. I might instead avoid all that by including a condition for posting such as that they grant me a licence to display their work. This is what I've done for this blog.

Third, it seems the web is still a mysterious place for legislators. There is much case law for the print media that hasn't moved across to blogging and probably should have. A bit like Common Law, in which it needs to be court tested, blogging seems to rely on some of the protection for the print media even though its applicability for the online world has not been tested in court.

That means that I'm going to explicitly protect myself rather than rely on assumptions. If I put it in the Terms and Conditions, I'm pretty well right to go.

There are some liabilities I can't assign away, and some I can get a licence for. I think if I'm pretty upfront with my users, I can at least show my intent to regulators if there are problems later.

Of course, if the legislation had kept up, a difficult task I know, we wouldn't have this uncertainty. Still, I am running just a small personal blog, and I don't want to spoil it with over-legalistic clap-trap. Simple statements of intent, simple conditions and simple disclaimers should provide the right balance to keep everyone happy.

Sources for some of this are Blogger Law, 12 Important Laws Every Blogger Should Know which I found particularly helpful, and Smashing Magazine, Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?