Twitter is the top word of 2009, beating out Obama, H1N1 and stimulus.  Other tech terms and phrases making the top list  include 2.0 and cloud computing.    Of course Twitter can’t be that popular without creating an opportunity for litigation.   Some Twitter scenarios:

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Check out the quizzes and calculator below to evaluate your knowledge in the areas of defamation and identity theft. 

Test your defamation savvy with Knight Citizen News Network’s quiz on the greatest defamation risk.  The quiz and additional resources on the site could be especially helpful for bloggers.

Use the Norton online risk calculator to determine how much an identity thief would pay for your personal information on the black market.  Contrast the thief’s cost to acquire your personal info with a company’s cost per lost record for a data breach.  

Test your phishing acumen with an online quiz, visit the SonicWall Phishing and Spam IQ quiz.  (Note this quiz was previously published in our Identity Theft series).

By applying an early state statute instead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding what constitutes actual malice, the 1^st Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston is allowing a libel lawsuit brought by a terminated employee against his employer to proceed. Since the content in question is an email that no one disputes is true, the ruling is creating a stir regarding the impact on the First Amendment.

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Message boards, blog comments and chat rooms create a whole new arena for a company to generate good public relations and maybe even spread a marketing message. It’s also a whole new opportunity for defamation. While there’s really no such thing as an anonymous press release, ad campaign or direct mail piece, anonymous posts made to industry blogs and message boards are commonplace.

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Tech Dirt has coined a phrase, the Streisand Effect, to refer to instances in which trying to diffuse unwanted publicity with legal action only serves to spur even more unwanted attention. We discussed just this type of occurrence in one of our most popular posts, Video of DEA Agent Shooting Himself Prompts Lawsuit.  Forbes has now set up a whole slideshow of Streisand Effect scenarios (go to the Tech Dirt article for the direct link).  All of these are excellent examples of why legal action is not always the best action.

The professional liability exposure of many industries has changed significantly in the past decade or so, and it’s about time the insurance industry catches up.

Many, probably most, companies now have at least some internet/technology risk in association with their business; for some companies it is a substantial exposure. Even companies that aren’t transacting business online, and collecting names and credit card numbers of customers that may be subject to a data breach, can have multiple exposures posed by the internet and their use of technology in the course providing business services to others.

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A U.S. District court judge in Texas has recently decided that linking to a webcast violates the law, unless the copyright owner gives permission. Those publishers in Belgium that previously kept Google from legally linking to their articles are now making a similar case against Yahoo. These two examples show how problematic linking continues to be. And while sometimes scenarios regarding linking are unique to media companies, links are a feature common to essentially all websites.

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