The Coming Legal Superstorm Against Bloggers - Exhibit 8

Justin Levine over at Calblog has another piece on the "coming legal superstorm against bloggers":

Exhibit 8 here. (Not so much a case "exhibit" admittedly, but an interesting commentary worth reading.)

Tech Central Station seems to agree with the issue that I have been sounding the alarm bell over for some time now.

The only thing that the writer is out to lunch on is that he fails to recognize that

The war is already here in terms of libel and copyright law. A further expansion of those already overbroad laws are hardly needed in order to shut bloggers down. His implication that copyright and libel laws are currently well balanced against First Amendment interests strikes me as utterly loony.

The expansion of FEC laws are already in the works. Talk radio was the canary in the blogger birdcage as far as that front is concerned.

I will keep saying it until I am blue in the face - the only viable long-term solution is to scale back the entire scope of libel and copyright laws.

Simply attempting to carve out a "blogging exception" will never work and will easily be bypassed by a legal establishment that looks for loopholes. (Just like carving out a "blog" exception to the Apple case won't work either. Courts will never accept that since it would effectively end their ability to subpoena witnesses altogether. The attack shouldn't be directed at evidentiary "privileges" or arguments as to what constitutes a "journalist", but rather must be waged against "trade secret" laws in general - something that the conservative/blog/legal establishment isn't up for quite frankly.)

Exhibit 7 here.

Exhibit 6 here (with further links to exhibits 1 - 5).

So, will bloggers unite to fight the MSM?

Will strength in numbers be able to subdue these attacks and allow blogging to be a subset of a new Media?

Stay tuned.....