The Wardman Wire

The Monday Morning Team Meeting at the Lawyers’ Office

Credit: www.weblogcartoons.com

Bearing in mind that we have been visited by M’Learned Friends from bplaw.com, I thought I would help with the research by stating clearly what the policies are here with respect to Cease and Desist letters, and explain how you can question points of fact on this site.

After all, I wouldn’t want to cause excessive expenditure on legal fees - especially if the enquiries ever happen to be paid for from taxpayers’ money.

Our terms and conditions page is here, linked from the top menus of every page on the site to make sure that no one can miss it.

Correspondence

Firstly, our policy on legal correspondence:

We reserve the right to publish legal notices, emails or letters concerning the operation or content of this website at our sole discretion unless there has been an explicit agreement in advance in writing to keep such communications confidential. If you wish to guarantee that such communications remain unpublished, you must contact the site in advance to request our agreement. You can do this by emailing mattwardman at gmail dot com.

Any further correspondence related to an initial communication will be treated on the same terms as described in the previous paragraph, unless an explicit agreement to the contrary has been reached and confirmed in writing.

Errors of Fact

Secondly, we are always pleased to correct any factual errors.

Basically, any proven errors of fact made will be corrected in the original article, by publishing a correction at the same degree of prominence, or both. As far as practical, others who have quoted the article will be requested to make a note in their article - this would include, for example pinging back with the correction those who had linked to the original piece.

If articles are ever removed, a statement of why that has been done will be left in situ.

Alternatively, you can simply supply a correction yourself via a comment on the article - citing a source - and I will apply the correction in the article where appropriate.

You can keep track of what is happening in that article via either the “subscribe to comments by email” feature beneath every post, or by subscribing to the comments feed for the entire site here in an RSS Reader.

My opinion is that the blog format is far superior to newspaper and other media websites where corrections and updates are concerned - since they are done in the same place rather than buried in an obscure “corrections” column several days later.

In particular, the blog approach will automatically update the Google Cache with any corrections - where a site is cached in Google.

How to make us Annoyed

A number of the legal letters I have seen challenging articles on blogs seem to be very “general”, simply asserting that “your blog site contains defamatory material about x, y or z”.

Blogs are subject to the same legal framework as newspapers and other media outlets, and I am not aware that national newspapers receive such woolly communications.

As I write this post there are 1905 articles on the Wardman Wire - so you can see exactly why communication which does not identify specifics is difficult for us to deal with. When I say “specifics”, I mean that text which is alleged to be wrong, “defamatory” or whatever needs to be quoted, or at the very least the full web address of the article needs to be quoted.

We are sceptical about over-general assertions, and we think Courts of Law will be sceptical too.

Getting in Touch

You can either contact me at “mattwardman at gmail dot com” or via the site contact form.

Wrapping Up

It’s always a pleasure when M’Learned Friends become readers. If you want to email cartoons (such as the one above) around the office that is generally fine, as long as you maintain the copyright acknowledgement. Links are better, however - as links help support the site. You may need to watch out for intolerant management policies on accessing humorous material - and especially political blogs - in working hours, however.

Talk to us and we will work with you if we agree there is a problem.