On Thursday night, Sam Terilli, spoke with our Online Journalism class on defamation and copyright law. As a lawyer and professor, Terilli was able to offer personal insight as well as professional advice. He highlighted the Fair Use Doctrine and the Digital Millennium Rights Act of 2002.
My favorite topic in the first half of his discussion, which was on copyright law, was when he talked about Google Books. Google went to the libraries at major universities, copied some of their famous books, and uploaded them to the web. Rather than asking the rights holder for permission, they issued a general statement, telling them that they were going to do it, and the rights holder had to opt out if he/she didn't want to give Google the rights. By placing the burden on the rights holder, Google saved themselves a lot of time. But this brings up the question of if they legally had the right to go about obtaining books in that way.
In the second half of his talk, Terilli moved from copyright law to defamation. When I asked him who was responsible for the content printed on MiamiHerald.com's blogs, since it is printed under the Herald's banner, but is not necessarily seen by editors, we moved into an entire conversation about open forums and their rights. Terilli spoke of how Section 230 protected forums from being responsible for content written on their site. That is how AOL Bulletins and chat rooms have never gotten AOL into trouble. They individuals who post comments are responsible for their own content, and not the forum itself.
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