6 Blog Laws And Legal Considerations For Bloggers

Learn how to comply with blog laws with these legal considerations for bloggers so you can grow and protect your blogging business.

Today, there are millions of bloggers and the internet has become a place where people communicate and share copious amounts of information. However, there are some legal pitfalls with blogging, and many bloggers don’t know how to deal with them.

These legal tips for bloggers will help you implement the website disclaimers and affiliate disclaimer statements you need to comply with and understand the blogging rules and regulations and legal considerations for bloggers to avoid running afoul of the blog laws.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or counsel. It discusses general legal considerations for bloggers, provides insights into digital content laws, and offers resources to help protect your blog content and create legal pages or disclaimers. For specific legal guidance, consult a qualified attorney.

Contents

6 Blog Laws & Legal Considerations for Bloggers

In this article, we focus on some of the blog laws and legal issues that bloggers need to be mindful of, such as creating legal pages for your blog, including website legal disclaimers, and legal considerations for blog content.

#1. Respect people’s privacy

Revealing personal information about someone is one of the most sensitive legal issues around blogging. A private fact is a detail that highlights certain information about an individual and the individual has not made it public yet.

However, what constitutes private facts is a really grey area and it may be hard to tell what is private and what is not. For example, a person’s romantic affair or sexual orientation might be an invasion of privacy, and publishing it on your blog is an offense.

Doxxing (short for “dropping documents”) refers to publicly sharing someone’s private or personal information online without their consent. This information may include home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, workplace details, or financial records.

Typically, doxxing is intended to intimidate, harass, or harm the targeted individual. It often occurs in conflicts online, with the perpetrator seeking to expose or endanger someone they disagree with or dislike.

As a blogger, it’s essential to understand the risks and implications of doxxing and refrain from publishing private facts about individuals on your blog. This can lead to legal trouble for violating privacy laws or engaging in harassment and severely damage your credibility and trust with your audience.

Legal Consequences of Doxxing

Doxxing can lead to serious legal trouble as it often violates privacy and harassment laws. The specific legal implications depend on the jurisdiction and the severity of the act. Here are some common legal issues associated with doxxing:

Invasion of Privacy: Revealing personal information without consent may violate privacy laws. In many jurisdictions, sharing sensitive information without permission can result in fines or lawsuits.
Harassment and Cyberbullying Laws: If doxxing leads to stalking, harassment, or threats, the perpetrator may face criminal charges under harassment or cyberbullying statutes.
Identity Theft: Using someone’s personal information for malicious purposes, such as impersonation or financial fraud, can lead to charges of identity theft.
Defamation: If the shared information is false or misleading and damages the victim’s reputation, the perpetrator could face defamation lawsuits.
Criminal Offenses: In extreme cases, doxxing that results in physical harm, stalking, or endangerment could lead to charges like criminal intimidation or reckless endangerment.

Examples of Legal Trouble from Doxxing

Civil Lawsuits: Victims of doxxing can sue perpetrators for damages, especially if they face financial loss, emotional distress, or reputational harm.
Criminal Charges: In some countries, doxxing falls under cybercrime laws, and offenders can face imprisonment. For example, the U.S. prosecutes doxxing under laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) if hacking is involved.
Restraining Orders: Courts may issue protective orders against individuals involved in doxxing to prevent further harm.

Responsible blogging means staying informed about online privacy and maintaining integrity in your content. If you want to post personal details about someone, the safest way to go about it is to mention what is already in the public domain with a link to the original source to avoid facing a lawsuit.

Bloggers should be aware of defamation laws and ensure they aren’t making false statements about others that could lead to a lawsuit. If you’re an Indian blogger, the Supreme Court’s recent judgment upholding Sections 499 and 500 of the IPC as constitutionally valid will apply to you.

Always prioritize ethical practices by protecting the privacy of others, avoiding the publication of sensitive information, and safeguarding your own data to prevent becoming a victim of doxxing yourself.

Resources:

Intellectual Property Security Awareness for Social Media

#2. Avoid plagiarism

As per digital content laws for bloggers, you must ensure the content you publish is not plagiarized or copied from someone else’s blog. Plagiarism involves taking somebody else’s intellectual property and making it your own without authorization.

Bloggers should be aware that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) provides copyright owners with a set of remedies if they find their copyrighted material being infringed upon on the internet.

If you’re found guilty of republishing other people’s work without their consent, you could face a lawsuit for diminishing the value of their intellectual property in the market. These remedies include sending a DMCA takedown notice to the infringing website, which will result in the removal of the infringing content.

In addition, bloggers should be aware that they could be held liable for any copyright infringement on their websites. This means that if someone posts copyrighted material on your blog without your permission, you could be sued by the copyright owner.

To avoid this, have a policy for dealing with copyright infringement.

What is generally allowed is re-publishing quotes on your blog for the purpose of reporting, commentary, or even research with a link or attribution to the original source of the information.
What is not allowed is copying and pasting large chunks of information onto your blog without quoting the source or getting prior permission to do so.

Never use copyrighted images without permission. Instead, you can use the free images provided by these royalty-free stock photo providers.

Being sued for infringement of copyright is a serious thing. If you want to use a copyrighted image, you need to get permission from the copyright holder before using it on your blog.

You may be asked to take down the content or to pay royalty fees. If you’re faced with a lawsuit for infringement of intellectual property rights, hire an intellectual property rights lawyer immediately.

Bloggers can obtain a copyright from the original content owners. For example, if they want to publish content from a university, they must contact the university and obtain permission.

Resources:

#3. Protect your own content

If someone attempts to infringe on your copyright, as per blogs and copyright laws you can ask them politely to cease and desist or initiate a takedown of the content under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

To prevent your articles from being copied and pasted, you can use a WordPress plugin provided by services like Digiprove that provides online certification of intellectual property and digital content to prove your copyright ownership and other IP rights.

If you want people to be able to copy material from your blog and republish it, save your work under the Creative Commons License, which allows bloggers to republish some of your content, as long as they cite you as the original author.

If your content is published under the Creative Commons License, you can ask the blogger to attribute it to you. If you’re the one who is responsible for the infringement of intellectual property rights, you must attribute it to the original author to avoid a lawsuit.

Resources:

#4. Disclose affiliate links

If you publish a blog with content that is paid for, sponsored, or contains affiliate links, you’re required by the FTC to provide disclosure about it, by including a disclaimer for affiliate links, otherwise, you would be in legal violation of their disclosure terms.

Bloggers and social media influencers are legally required to disclose any financial relationships they have with the brands or products they write about with an FTC affiliate disclosure statement and place the affiliate link disclosure as close as possible to the triggering claim.

It is usually sufficient to create a disclaimer/disclosure page or include a sentence with such a disclosure in the header of your blog or before the article. Affiliate disclosure statements must also be included in emails, eBooks, or any other form of content where you use affiliate links.

You can even use funny affiliate disclosures if you don’t want to turn off your readers. Here are some important rules to keep in mind:

Making false statements: Never make false statements about a product or service. If you do so, you could be sued for defamation by the company or individual who manufactures or provides that product or service.
For Amazon affiliates: Some affiliate programs, such as the Amazon affiliate program, require that you have an Amazon affiliate disclosure above the fold, where it is clearly visible to readers. Amazon affiliates are not allowed to include their Amazon affiliate links in emails or eBooks.

As an affiliate best practice, avoid reviewing products or services that you have not personally tried or sampled. If you’re going to review a product or service, make sure you have actually tried it yourself. If you haven’t tried it or checked out the free trial (at the very least), don’t write about it.

#5. Create your blog legal pages

Why are blog legal pages so important? If you don’t have your website legal pages for bloggers, you’re opening yourself and your blogging business up to legal action for any statements you make.

As a blogger, you must have a privacy policy for blogs, terms and conditions, website disclaimer statements, and any other legal statements required in the state or country in which you operate.

Bloggers are generally required to have three legal pages on their websites:

Privacy Policy Page
Website Disclaimer Page
Terms and Conditions Page

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires websites to update their privacy policy with essential information about how they collect data and what businesses plan to do with it after receiving this personal information.

Bloggers must ensure GDPR compliance by updating their privacy policy to include this essential information about how their website collects and uses customer data.

The GDPR-compliant blog privacy document should clearly disclose personal data usage and outline procedures for handling requests for access, correction, or deletion.

#6. Collect cookie consent

No matter the size of your online presence, a cookie banner is essential. Under the Cookie Law, you must obtain informed user consent before storing non-essential cookies, such as tracking cookies, on their devices.

Displaying a cookie banner when users first visit your site or app is a key requirement for compliance with the EU’s Cookie Law and GDPR. It ensures users are fully informed about how their data is collected and used.

Relying on free privacy policy templates or plugins may leave gaps in compliance with regional laws or platform requirements, which could expose you to risks.

With tools designed for laws like GDPR, CCPA, and E-Privacy, as well as Google Analytics and AdSense guidelines, you can easily create a cookie consent banner tailored to your needs — no technical expertise required.

Here are some cookie consent tools to help you stay compliant, build trust, and protect your online presence effortlessly:

Cookiebot™ CMP: Its automation-powered solution seamlessly integrates into your blog, enabling effortless consent collection and management while building trust with your audience. Stores consent logs for up to 12 months to keeps you audit-ready and focused on creating content.
CookieYes: As a certified Google CMP partner, it seamlessly integrates with Google Tag Manager, Consent Mode V2, and IAB TCF v2.2, keeping you compliant with evolving regulations.
iubenda: It offers a complete set of solutions to achieve 100% compliance, in every case, on major compliance points to make your website or app compliant with the law, in multiple languages and legislations.

How to Craft Your Legal Disclaimers

If you’re not a certified expert and don’t have professional credentials on the topics that you write about in your blog the best practice would be to have an “informational purposes only disclaimer” somewhere on the page to reduce your liability.

This is especially important if you create content on YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics such as health, law, and finance that require professional expertise.

For instance, if you’re writing an article that discusses legal considerations for bloggers, you may want to include a legal opinion disclaimer in the article, unless you ARE a legal expert and write an attorney blog.

A no-responsibility disclaimer template should be written by a legal expert, not free software that spits out a legal disclaimer for websites. Now, I’m not an attorney and don’t claim to understand disclaimer law.

However, I do know that free legal disclaimers and policies online are often deficient as they’re not drafted by a real attorney, and don’t offer complete legal protection for bloggers, or the peace of mind you deserve.

For example, that free medical disclaimer for website content could prove very expensive if you don’t have a proper website liability disclaimer and your blog content falls afoul of the laws of your country or state.

In addition, these free legal disclaimers may not include the Amazon disclosure and affiliate marketing disclaimer that you need to add to your disclaimer page if you promote affiliate products on your blog.

Amira’s Legal Bundle For Your Website includes the legal disclaimer templates to complete your blog legal pages and website disclaimers within minutes.

Instead of relying on free policies that don’t provide the same comprehensive legal protections you need for your blogging business, you’ll have complete satisfaction and peace of mind knowing that all these legal templates are drafted by an experienced attorney,

To stay compliant with all the blog laws and avoid blogging legal issues, follow the blogging rules and regulations above, and always consult a legal professional when required, so you can protect your blogging business, and prosper as a blogger.

Blogging tips & tools

Priya Florence Shah

Priya Florence Shah is a bestselling author and an award-winning blogger. Check out her book on emotional self-care for women. Priya writes short stories and poetry and chills with her two-legged and four-legged kids in her spare time.

www.blogbrandz.com/tips/subscriber/