In contrast to the below mentioned bloggers, intellectually this week has been more or less fruitless for me, and I guess the fact that I have been spending most time at home, idly surfing with a minor fever, shows through the selection of URLS, I have uploaded ;). Well, I have enjoyed surfing for fun, haven't really done that so much at home before, but now, thanks to the ADSL, I tend to pursue every odd link I come across (not v. good for the ph.d., so will have to go into detoxication at some point, I fear...).

One of the links, I came across earlier this week was a very male blogg Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About - which amidst all the ranting about writer's wife oddities, turned out to contain a link to a thoughtprovoking story about misuse of the guy's blogg. He was at some point approached by Mail on Sunday who offered him £800 if they could use excerpts in his blogg in article. Since blogg contained very personal information, he declined - and some time later was informed by a friend that Mail On Sunday had lifted text from the blogg anyway, just changing the names and making no reference whatever to the blogg or the writer. The writer then informed friends and friendly sites and got himself an agent who started negotiating with MoS, and after interlude which included writer commenting on the case in his blogg and being threatened by MoS for defamation. they ended offering him £1600 and an apology which he accepted. But as he says somewhere, if there hadn't been a least one decent person at MoS who had actually started out offering him money, they could as well just have gone ahead and just used his material without ever contacting him in the first place, which I guess would have made it even more difficult for him to make a case, unless he had a lot of money and lots of clever lawyers.
Not that I could ever imagine any sleasy Danish newspaper using the content of this blogg for a leisurely sunday read ;), but it does make you think. doesn't it? I am considering doing like Jill and Lars Konzack (see his recent entry on this matter) and getting a ISSN number for Klastrup's Cataclysms- and of course, putting a copyright note on the site, as Gonzalo Frasca has done. I guess this is what you can legally do to protect your material as a weblog writer right now, or?
# posted by Lisbeth at: 18:22