Though blogging anonymously in John doe is considered one of the safest ways of expressing your views and thoughts, the legal issues would still follow you. There are a lot of instances where the anonymous blogger’s identity has been traced and has attracted legal issues against them. Once the blogger is identified, the internet service provider receives a notification or summons from the court.
Generally, the internet service provider is capable of handling such issues, but if it goes beyond their limit of control, they choose to keep the blogger informed about the consequences. In such cases, the blogger has to take a call to hire a competent lawyer. There are a lot of things that you need to check when you are hiring such lawyers to fight for you when you are issued with a legal notice.
- Understand the expertise of the lawyer
- Get to know the relevant experience of the lawyer in the areas of anonymous blogging
- Understand the number of cases that handled in the past
- Try to find out the reputation of the lawyer
- Get to know if they are confident enough to fight for you
There could be a lot of reasons as to why your blog post could have attracted legal issues, but handling them effectively is completely in your hands. In this article, we are going to focus on some of those points that would help you to understand when an anonymous blogger would end up getting caught in the hands of the law.
It is important that every blogger follows the rules and regulations as published for anonymous blogging. Most of the anonymous bloggers attract legal issues when they fail to follow these policies as these clauses are made to respect the anonymity of the writers and also the content being published. Mentioned below are some of the times when an anonymous blogger gets trapped in the hands of the law.
- Plagiarism
Whether you are writing with your identity revealed or blogging anonymously, it becomes highly essential for a blogger to produce plagiarism free content. You must always learn to respect the policies and abide by them.
Even though you are blogging anonymously, stealing content is definitely not the right thing to do. During such situations, you are either obliged to give credits to the original source or completely avoid lifting information from the other sources.
If the original content generator finds this out, it gives them full liberty to raise a notice against you. The situation might become impossible for you to handle unless and until you have a great lawyer by your side.
- Do not steal photographs.
Some of the bloggers feel that photographs can be taken from any of the websites without giving any credit or even without going through the license information. One must understand that photographs are also forms of content that are available on the internet. Stealing photographs from the websites without understanding the copyright issues is as good as stealing the information from another website completely.
This will again give the photographer and the website owner full access to raise a legal notice against you.
- Try avoiding court summons
A lot of anonymous bloggers fall into the trap of legal issues when they fail to ignore the summons from the court. If you have already received notification from your internet service provider about the legal notice, it becomes extremely important for you to abide by the rules as mentioned on the notice and attend the court sessions regularly.
Failing to attend proceedings can result in severe punishment, depending on the severity of the issue.
- Revealing people’s information without their permission
Though you are blogging anonymously, it does not give you any liberty or leverage to publish the personal information of anybody without their permission. If an anonymous blogger ends up doing these things, the person whose name is mentioned on the blog gets the full right to issue a legal notice against the blogger. The blogger can only save himself/herself only if there is a disclaimer specified.
- Using copyrighted images
Some of the websites are dedicated to publishing photographs. Taking images from these websites is allowed; however, the accessibility of these images is categorized depending on the copyrights. Unless and until it is a royalty-free image, the websites like TechCrunch, Mashable and HuffPost generally forbid the other users from using their images on their blog.
If the website finds out those images being published on your blog without appropriate reasons, they might immediately reason legal notice against you.
These are some of the times that an anonymous blogger would fall into trouble. All these things can be sorted out when you hire the right lawyer, but, at the same time, it is important to follow the rules rather than getting into such troubles unnecessarily.
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2018 ·
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