Good to Know: Comments and the Law

Here’s a useful factoid for those of you out there who might be considering adding or updating your blog comment policy:

One of the biggest arguments in the debate over moderating comments is that editing inappropriate comments may lead to the site’s liability in defamation cases. The Communications Decency Act of 1996, however, has protected sites from becoming liable for user comments; it is only when an editor changes the meaning of a post to make it libelous that a site becomes responsible.

I used to have a link to my comment policy, but somewhere along the line of the site move & redesign I dropped it. I don’t get enough comments here to need a complex policy, honestly, but in the interest of clarity, here is is:

Comment Policy

I reserve the right to delete any comment left on this site or any URLs left in comments, for any reason or for no reason at all. I pay for the web hosting; I get to decide how my disk space and bandwidth are used, and where my outclicks go. However, I do not edit the words left by my commenters. They remain as their authors wrote them.