Bloggers Beware!

Lawsuits and indictments showered on blogger....

A student was indicted last month after Taipei County commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) filed a lawsuit against him regarding contents on his blog.

During the campaign for the Taipei County commissioner election in 2005, Tseng Yen-wei (曾彥衛), a university student at the time, created a blog satirizing Chou, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate.

Tseng, now 24 years old, is a graduate student at National Taiwan Normal University.

Although Chou was elected, he filed a lawsuit against Tseng for "spreading rumors or untrue statements" with the "intention to prevent a candidate's election," aspersions and copyright violation.

The copyright violation action was because Chou believed that the name of Tseng's Web site, "Wiego's blog," was an imitation of Chou's official campaign Web site "Weigo's blog."

In addition, Chou also alleged that the logo which Tseng used on his blog was an imitation of Chou's official campaign logo.

Tseng denied that he had "spread rumors or untrue statements" with the "intention to prevent a candidate's election" as Chou had alleged, and defended his freedom of speech.

"I gathered all the information from the mass media, which was open to everybody," Tseng said.

"For example, Lo Wen-chia (羅文嘉) was the one who first talked about the Yung-chou case, and I merely quoted him," Tseng said. "How come it's not a problem to talk about it, but it is a problem to cite the information on the Web?"

I'm not going to say anything else. Conclusions are obvious.

[Taiwan]