Blogging – Are You Exposing Yourself To Legal Liabilities?

In November 2006, Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report released by Microsoft’s MSN and Windows Live Online Services Business revealed that 46% or nearly half of the online population have a blog [Blogging Phenomenon Sweeps Asia available at PRNewswire.com].

Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report was conducted online on the MSN portal across 7 countries in Asia namely Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. Interestingly, the report found that 56% of Malaysians blogged to express their views, while 49% blogged to keep friends and family updated.

This article focuses on Malaysian law however as the Internet transcends boundaries and jurisdictions therefore the laws of many countries may apply. In Malaysia, bloggers face legal risks that carry civil or criminal liabilities such as;

(a) copyright;

(b) trademark;

(c) defamation; and

(d) sedition.

Other than the above, a blogger must consider other legal risks such as fraud, breach of confidentiality and misrepresentation which will not be addressed in this article.

Copyright protects the way artists or authors express their idea or fact on a piece of work but not the underlying idea or fact itself. Copyright protects originality of the work and prohibits unauthorised copying. Copyright protection is eligible for the following works refer to Section 7 (1) of the Copyright Act, 1987:-

(a) literary works, such as written works, novels, source codes in computer program and web pages and content in multimedia productions;

(b) musical and dramatic works, such as musical score, plays and television scripts;

(c) artistic works, such as drawings, sculptures and photographs; and

(d) sound recordings and films, such as films (traditional celluloid and various video formats), records, tapes and CDs of music, drama or lectures.

Unfortunately, much of the copyright infringement occurring on the Internet goes undetected. New blogs at times use existing blogs for its content and this is done through copying or linking. Apart from that, posting copyrighted photographs, designs, product photos or product packaging from another website is also illegal.

There are “rules of thumb” to follow when creating or posting contents such as:- (a) create one’s own original image, graphic, code and words; (b) use licensed works within the scope of permitted use laid down by the owner; and (c) use free images off the Internet as long as the terms of the creator of the image are followed.

The same “rules of thumb” apply when posting programming scripts as it is normally a violation of copyright law to appropriate programming scripts from third parties. With regards to postings on one’s blog by third parties, the blog owner may receive an implied licence to the postings made by third parties. When offering podcast i.e. recorded and dowloadable audio file to be downloaded from blogs it is best that the podcast do not contain any copyrighted music belonging to others thus protecting oneself from any copyright infringement suits.

If copyright protects the way ideas or facts are expressed, trademark on the other hand protects words, designs, phrases, numbers, drawings or pictures associated with products and services.

A trademark owner enjoys exclusive right to use his mark in relation to his products and services refer Section 35 (1) of the Trademark Act, 1976. Trademark protection grants right to the trademark owner to prevent others from using identical trademark with identical goods or similar goods that is likely to cause confusion to the public refer Section 19 (1) and 19 (2) of the Trademark Act, 1976.

How does a blogger infringe trademark belonging to another? One example is when a blogger posts links on logos belonging to a trademark owner. When a visitor clicks on the trademark it will directly lead the visitor to the blogger’s blog instead of directing the visitor to the trademark owner’s website.

Such linking may cause confusion or deception as it raises serious risk that the blog is in some way connected with or related to the trademark owner’sproducts and services.

Generally, the term defamation refers to a false statement made about someone or an organization that is damaging to their reputation. The person publishing the statement must have known or should have known that the statement was false. While the Internet provides the arena in which defaming statement can be made or published, there is no specific legislation that deals with defamation on the Internet in Malaysia.

In Malaysia, the Defamation Act, 1957 applies to publications in printed materials and broadcasting through radio or television. Since the law applies to published or broadcast materials, hence in principle it applies to materials such as blogs and websites published on the Internet.

As defamation law is complex there is a need to distinguish whether a defamatory statement is a libel (written form) or slander (spoken words). In a case of libel, if it is determined that the statement is defamatory then there are presumptions against the author or the publisher. In the case slander, there is often the requirement to proof actual damages or special damages suffered due to the defamatory statement. Hence, slander law does not apply to blogs as it does not fall within the ambit of broadcasting the slanderous words by means of radio or television.

Due to rapid changes to the Internet and the convergence of technologies, one will wonder whether the courts will apply the libel law or slander law when blogs converted from text to speech format are transmitted on the Internet. However, all this depends on proving defamation and finding the identity of the blogger which can be an enormous task due to the anonymity of the Internet and its worldwide scope.

Another legal risk is when blogs are used to disseminate false,incomplete or misleading information regarding racial disturbances or contents that cause hatred or contempt towards the government or the ruler. In Malaysia, various offences are provided for in the Sedition Act 1948 such as it is an offence for any person to print, publish or distribute any seditious publication- see Section 4 of the Sedition Act, 1948 for other offences. Whether the provisions in the Act apply to publications on the Internet have not been judicially determined.

In Singapore the sedition law was applied in 2005 where the Singapore court jailed two users for posting seditious remarks on the Internet- Two jailed for ‘sedition’ on internet, South China Morning Post, Saturday, October 8, 2005. The South China Morning Post reported that the case is considered a landmark case underscoring the government’s attempts to regulate online expression and crack down on racial intolerance. The two cases represented the first time Singaporeans had been prosecuted and convicted for racist expression under its Sedition Act.

Arising from the case of the racist bloggers, on 8 November 2006 the Singapore Government proposed changes to its Penal Code taking into account the impact of technology such as the Internet and mobile phones- refer to Singapore Ministry of Home Affairs, Consultation Paper on the Proposed Penal Code Amendments at page 2. The amendments cover offences committed via electronic medium such as Section 298 (uttering words, etc with deliberate intent to wound the religious feelings of any person) to cover the wounding of racial feelings as well, Section 499 (defamation) and Section 505 (statements conducing to public mischief) to expand and include those “published in written, electronic or other media” see Singapore Penal Code (Amendment) Bill at pages 8 and 20. These amendments when passed empower the police and state prosecutors to prosecute those with offending blogs- Cf.Sections 298, 499 and 505 of the Malaysian Penal Code (Revised 1997).

There are reasons why the authorities are taking blogging seriously as half of the people that took part in the Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report survey believe that blog contents are as trustworthy as traditional media and a quarter of the respondents believe blogs to be the quickest way to learn about news and current affairs.

With such reliance on blogs, contents containing false, incomplete or misleading information posted on blogs not only may cause panic, anger, contempt or political scandals; it may also cause political and economic instability.

The Internet presents challenges to existing laws that are slow to provide adequate protection to a party with respect to the use and content of blogs. Currently, codes of practice for Internet users including bloggers have not been proposed as part of the Internet regulatory regime currently operating in Malaysia.

Instead, bloggers need to practise self-regulation and understand the legal implications of blogging to ensure that their blogs are written in a responsible and lawful manner. In order to protect themselves, bloggers may provide terms of use and proper disclaimer to offer some degree of comfort and protection from third parties postings on their blogs.

For those bloggers who are not self-aware of the legal risks, efforts should be made to educate and raise awareness to those bloggers. Perhaps the social responsibility lies on the Internet service providers and website service providers to create a blogger’s code of ethics to educate its bloggers to be ethical towards their readers, the people they write about and the legal ramifications of their actions.

First Published at Current Law Journal April Part 2 [2007] 2 CLJ i

Indian Bloggers Income From Blogging Full Time

Bloggers like Amit Agrawal and Harsh Agrawal are earning more than Rs 40 lakhs per month. Not only them, several bloggers earning Rs 40 lakhs per month in India.

If you have patience and passion to write, start blogging. You need to spend minimum Rs 3000-5000 to book a domain and start web hosting. We will provide you tips to start blogging to earn money from home. Blogging is a secure passive income. Rest is a history.

Select a niche market. There are 100 of topics available to blog. We cannot be master of all. But, we can try to blog on different topics. After blogging for 20-30 articles, we will get an idea. Automatically, we will understand our expertise, passion and fun in writing.

We can start with travel blog, shopping or food. If you are good in technology, try for it. The market is open. Do not fear for the competitor.

With each blog, you will learn and perform better than the previous blogs. There is no thumb rule to be a successful blogger. Those earning Rs 10-20 lakhs per month by blogging are like us.

They also suffer setbacks, disappointment and even left blogging before tasting success. So, read popular blogs in India. Some are writing hindi blogs and earning a lot. We have to learn and earn.

There are various tips to start blogging to earn money from home available in YouTube as well. Watch them and read the success stories of successful bloggers in India. Below we will provide some blog examples.

I am giving a list of top 15 heavy traffic blogs in India. Learning from them will give us an idea how to start blogging to earn money from home.

BloggingX

Udit Goenka

Labnol.org

YourStory.com

Trak.in

Bloggers Ideas

Digital Deepak

99Signals

ShoutMeLoud

Bloggers Passion

JagoInvestor.com

Techpp.com

AllTechBuzz.net

PhoneRadar.com

VegRecipesofIndia.com

Before you close this page, see the income of best bloggers in India. We are showing the expected income per month from blogging.

Blogger (Earnings per month)

Amit Agrawal ( US$ 60,000)

Harsh Agrawal (US$ 52,434)

Faisal Farooqui (US$ 50,000)

Shradha Sharma (US$ 30,000)

Varun Krishnan ( US$ 22,000)

Srinivas Tamada (US$ 20,000)

Ashish Sinha (US$ 18,000)

Arun Prabhudesai (US$ 15,000)

Do you want to become a blogger and earn Rs 40 lakhs per month. You can be a stock traders and earn more. But, stock market is risky. Blog is not risky.

Don’t asked me how much I earn, I am just starting. And I will disclose my income after 2 years. For this I need patience, dedication and consistency in blogging.

Blogging – How to Start a Simple Blog From Scratch? The 6 Simple Steps to Help You

Someone have asked me before: “I want to make some money online, but I don’t have money to even start a home business. I know I can use blogs to sell stuff, but I am not good at computers, and I don’t even know how to start a simple blog. Can you help me?” I smile. “Don’t worry”, I told him, it’s not as difficult as it seems.

Starting a simple blog with blogger.com can be a challenging task if you do not even know how to go about it. But not to worry, you can easily start a Free blog with Blogger.com and later monetize your blog with affiliate programs and ads …

Before you start to create your first blog, decide the name of your blog and get your Google email account username and password ready.

Here’s 6 simple Steps How to Start a simple Blog with a Blogger account:

1) Go to Blogger.com, and choose “Create Your Blog Now” to create your blog.

2) Create a Google Account. Do you have a Google account? If yes, just sign in with your Google account username and password. If not, create a Google Account here.

3) Enter the name or title of your blog here. For example, if your blog is on “Website Traffic”, so you may want to put “Website Traffic or How to Get Traffic to Your Website” here. Then, also, what will your your domain blog address to called? Choose a “keyword-rich title” domain preferably or an easy-to-remember domain name to reflect your personality or brand.

4) Next, choose your template. There are various great Blogger templates available, so pick your favourite template here. Click “Preview Template” here. If you don’t like your template, you can always change it later.

5) Great, your new Blogger blog has been created. Congratulations

6) Now, it’s time to write your first blog post… You can starting writing your content. If you have nothing to write, leave it, you can always come back again. Remember to “Preview” your post first before you “Publish” your blog”.

While starting your online business, you may face a bit of “hiccups” or failures along the way. However, as long as you never give up and are persistent, you should have no problem solving your online “hurdles”…

I would like to quote what Abraham Lincoln says “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”. How true this is! Never lose your enthusiasm on your online business because I strongly believe that at the end of a “dark” tunnel, there is always “light”. So, have confidence in yourself, my friend, and I will see you at the top.

Blogging Tips For Beginners

You may already have a blog or want to start a new blog so here are blogging tips starting from choosing the blog name (domain name). Please read following 25 blogging tips to build better blog.

Following are Blogging tips useful before starting a new blog or writing new post. These are important for search engine optimization.

1) First do the keyword research for the blog topic / subject. Finding popular keywords related to your blog or your post topic is must. You will need at least 2-3 keywords to be used in blog title and around 10 keywords for post titles to start with.

2) Try to use the keywords in domain name, blog title, post title, post content,hyper link, ALT tag, TITLE tag etc.in a natural way.This will help you to get higher search engine ranking.

3) Try to limit no. of your labels / categories around 20. Use tag cloud or label cloud if you want to save space. If you have many topics on one blog try to regroup and relabel. If totally different topics are mixed on one blog and has sufficient no. of posts for each topic then start new blog for that topic.

4) Do not copy old posts of a blog on new blog.You can get penalized for duplicate content.You need to remove old copy from the search engine and then add same post at new blog.

5) Use post title optimization widget on this blog for blogger / blogspot blog so that you get better search engine ranking. WordPress bloggers can use plugin like All in one SEO for meta tag and title optimization.

Following are blogging tips related to look and content of the blog.

6) The look and layout of the blog should be nice, neat and beautiful so that it can create good impression on the visitor and he should feel to stay more and visit again. Content quality should also be good for this.

7) Navigation and layout should be such that visitor should be able to find the recent posts, labels very easily. So if Recent posts and Labels are near top of side bar it will be visible in first screen of the blog and the visitor will have a quick idea of what the blog is about and can jump to his topic of interest quickly.

8) Use pictures, images wherever possible to make your post colorful and attractive. Do picture / image optimization as described in my earlier post. No need to use large images, you can use medium to small images.

9) Loading time of the blog should not be very long or visitor will run away before the page opens. So keep check on what widgets / code you are installing and does it slows down the loading. If you are loading pictures, make sure that the file size is not big.

Do not use BMP files, you can use jpg, png files. Also check image size. You can do all this using photoshop. As sometimes images load slower from external sources, check that also.

Blogging tips related to writing and visitors

10) Write your post after proper research and gathering total information. Do not write too long. Use grouping, paragraph, sub titling for arranging the information in post body.

11) Writing language should be easy to understand and wherever possible write in humorous way. If visitor enjoys your post he will come back.

12) Give links to useful resources related to your topic. Also give links to your earlier posts with proper anchor text wherever possible. This improves internal linking of your blog.

13) Encourage the reader to participate / comment. You can also run some contest or survey on your blog and keep some prize for that.

14) Use beautiful and professional looking theme / template and header image for your blog. There are many free templates available so you can easily get one suitable to your blog. Choose 3 column template which uses full 1024 X 768 resolution.This gives you more space.

15) The font color and size should be such that blog should be readable in different screen resolution. Other blogging tips to increase readers and revenue.

16) Burn your feed at feedburner and provide subscribe via email facility for your RSS feed.

17) Check your blog visibility and feed in different browser.Especially in internet explorer and Firefox.

18) Try to increase your RSS feed subscriber and use AdSense for feed to display Google AdSense on the feed.

19) Use Google AdSense or other advertisements in post body, right hand side bar and below the header. Use AdSense link unit with labels or links or below header. Match background color of AdSense with blog or post background color.

20) Read my post on blog traffic tips to build traffic from sources other than search engine.

Following are precautionary blogging tips

21) There should not be many outgoing links (pointing to other websites / blogs) in the post or side bar. Remove unnecessary outgoing links. Place all outgoing links near bottom of right hand side bar or footer.

22 ) Do not buy or sell links for link building.

23) If paid posts are must for you keep it minimum or have separate website / blog for paid posts or articles.

24) As said above do not write same post again ( duplicate content ). Do not edit old post titles and content for search engine optimization.

25) Do not have METATAGS only for main home URL of blogger blog, as it will be used for all the post and you will get duplicate metatag error in Google webmaster tools. You are also misguiding and confusing search engine by having same meta tag for all posts. So you can use script / widget which can give different METATAGS to individual posts. WordPress blogger can have METATAG for individual post by using All in one SEO plug-in.

Blogging Syndication and Pinterest Marketing Exposed

Companies and individuals get excited about the open playing field blogging and Pinterest provides. Marketing trends on social media suggests it to be a vital traffic generation method for large and small corporations.

Why not market on here? This social media giant is more established in the eyes of the Big Search Engines. If you are running a blog; Keep reading to discover why you should consider promoting your business on this pinning phenom.

Why Market on Pinterest?

Not only does this visually inclined social network grow daily, their membership has exploded to 20 Mil users. This achievement allows them to claim 1 of the top 3 social networking sites globally. Users spend an average of 15 minutes per day browsing. Credit: copyblogger[dot]com

Is Pinterest Good For Marketing?

So what does this mean for you? Well, pinterest is an online bulletin board for people and businesses to pin photo’s, videos, blog posts, contests, infographics and more! This is golden, if you don’t have a million dollar marketing budget.

Because with Pinterest you can leverage their popularity to drive referral traffic right to your website, blog, YouTube channel or ezine article.

Why Are You Pinning on Pinterest?

Don’t be fooled by the silly task of pinning photo’s and videos. A picture is worth a million words, and videos typically last forever. In 2012 alone, Pinterest recorded driving more traffic than LinkedIn, Google+, Reddit, and YouTube – combined!

Lately, I’ve been watching industry leaders who generate all their wealth through business models and systems; Dominate this marketing beast known as Pinterest. So, I decided to take a closer look. Firstly, because of the popularity, here are 3 reasons why you must syndicate your blog with Pinterest.

3 Reasons Smart Marketers Love Pinterest Pinning?

  • High Page Rank and Domain Authority (SEO nerds)
  • ZERO-Stress Sign-Up Process, Minimum Promoting Restrictions
  • Pinners Purchase More Than Any Other Digital Channel (FB incl.)

So Do You Think Pinning is Vital To Bloggers?

The niche blogging is massive. In fact, it’s a super-niche! Bloggers rely heavily on generating traffic for content. Then monetizing that traffic with services,products, or both. Organic search traffic is their primary source of traffic, if they are not aware of how powerful social media can be.

Most bloggers have a basic understanding of how SEO works. On page, off page and the importance of back links. With the new Google updates like Panda and Hummingbird; What was taught in the SEO world just 1 year ago is completely obsolete.

Let me tell you my story. Before the last update from Google, I lost 90% of all my traffic. Which was coming mainly from Google search. With my traffic disappearing, my income instantly dropped!

My income dropped because I depend on traffic like every other business. Once I monetize this traffic, I use little-known psychology to convert my traffic into leads or potential customers.

Next, I have a series of automated up sells. So, because of the traffic disappearing I had to adapt. So I started marketing my business on ‘Pinterest’ and other social bookmark networks to serve as a tier 1 site. I will explain more about tiers later to build Google safe back links without penalty flags.

For now, I want you to understand that in the eyes of Google, Pinterest is golden. Do you want my formula for instant rankings in the search engines?

Sure you do! Grab something to write with: After publishing new content to your personal blog, EzineArticles or any site that makes you the money. By the way, this is referred to by SEO geeks as the (Money Site).

How To Use Pinterest For Business Marketing Vol 1:

Power Pinning For NON-seo geeks!

So immediately after you publish your article, you’re going to use social media to syndicate and start building backlinks. This social media layer will be your tier 1 site. It serves as a buffer site to build links. If I do not have the top social networks listed in my author account. Google it!

Semi Automated Marketing Tools and Software

Take those top sites, and register full profiles with your bio and picture. Don’t forget Pinterest. After you publish your blog post. Use a simple software like onlywire or hootsuite to blast simultaneously. You can also go to fiverr[dot]com, and search social bookmarks to find someone who will do this for $5.

Now, that you know how to start building a backlink profile with social media. Wait, until I tell you about what you can do on the 2nd and 3rd tier links to skyrocket your blog posts to the moon!

Pinterest marketing alone without backlink know-how, can drive you more traffic and sales based on the market research I performed on Quancast[dot]com. Which is a site where you can get demographics, which is vital to targeted marketing.

In closing, Pinterest marketing is more complex and powerful than you know. Add me on EzineArticles to be first to know when I release the 2nd volume of how to use Pinterest as a marketing tool!

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