Holtz Communications + Technology

Anybody involved with blogging (including PR people who are counseling their clients to jump into the blogosphere) needs to read Jeremy Pepper’s musings on the prospects for libel actions being taken against bloggers. Jeremy’s post includes interviews with a couple attorneys, including one for the New York Times.

I guess even PR firms have lawyers. I have often gone head-to-head with corporate attorneys who advise their organizations, in time of crisis or public scrutiny, to say nothing. “We’ll deal with it in court,” they say.

Qorvis Communications LLC, a Beltway PR firm, is in court right now, side-by-side with one of its clients, accused of making “false and misleading claims” about sugar substitute…

Andy Lark just suggested that communicators in the US need to join NIRI (the National Investor Relations Institute) and take SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) training, because communicators representing public companies are subject to laws bloggers are not. Question: Do communicators need to join an investor relations association or do communications associations like IABC need to provide communications-specific SOX training?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will defend AppleInsider and PowerPage, two blogs that divulged the computer maker’s plans for a product code-named “Asteroid.” The EFF asserts the bloggers shouldn’t have to disclose the source—an Apple insider—who revealed the plans. Apple has issued subpoenas to the bloggers demanding they name the source.

“Bloggers break the news, just like journalists do. They must be able to promise confidentiality in order…

The Recording Industry Association of America—that group best know these days for the intriguing strategy of suing their customers—insists that is model guarantees profitability for recording artists. Performers whose contracts with record labels include RIAA copyright protections supposedly earn money every time their music is played on the radio; radio stations (even Internet radio stations) make regular payments to cover these fees. To…

Back in my early days online, the online community to which I belonged—the WELL—had a simple slogan: “You own your own words.” They must not have been thinking about people who wrote using their employer’s computers. Jim Horton points to a story on C|Net about a Washington State man who used his office computer to search for pornography. Police seized the computer and used what they…