The Top Legal Issues with Blogging

A few years ago, one of our clients wrote a great blog post and they were looking for a good image to feature with it. They used Google Image Search, found an image that was filtered as royalty-free, and added it to the post.

Within days, they were contacted by a major stock image company and served with a bill for $3,000 to pay for the image use and avoid the legal issues associated with getting sued for copyright infringement. It’s that issue that drove us to subscribe to DepositPhotos for affordable and high-quality royalty-free images.

Whether you’re a business with a blog or, just have an individual blog, the issues don’t change. Of course, with a company blog you can bet that the zeal of prosecution may be a bit more aggressive and the penalties even steeper. The top 3 legal and liability issues that bloggers run into are:

1. Copyright Infringement – the use of works protected by copyright law without permission, infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works.
2. Defamation – the communication of a false statement that harms the reputation of an individual person, business, product, group, government, religion, or nation. To constitute defamation, a claim must generally be false and have been made to someone other than the person defamed.
3. CAN-SPAM violations – CAN-SPAM is the United States regulations covering commercial email messages. Violations can cost up to $16,000 fine each! Read: What is the CAN-SPAM Act?

This infographic, Blog Law 101, from Monder Law Group documents those top legal and liability issues associated with blogging as well as how to avoid them.

Disclosure: We’re using our affiliate link for DepositPhotos in this post.