While in the USA the Sixth District Court of Appeals on Friday defended (.pdf, via Wired) blogger rights to protect their sources. The case concerned Apple who claimed that the bloggers were not acting as journalists when they posted internal documents on future Apple products online. The court writes that the law is “…intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news…” and therefore it is not necessary to attempt to define the border between journalists and bloggers.
A Swedish case in 2001 (“Ramsbro” B 293-00) arrived at a similar conclusion (in Swedish). Here (pdf) is an unofficial translation of judgement by Bertil Wennergren, former justice of the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court (via Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights). In this case it was an “ordinary” web page and not a blog but the conclusion was that the activity of informing the public was what defined journalism and not whether or not this activity was conducted by accredited journalists or newspapers.
This is naturally an important step on the way to defining the legal position of bloggers but it remains a small step on a long road…