drstevej,

So what about you?

Dee: So what about you?

I am a Chaplain on Christian Forums https://www.christianforums.com

I think an additional blog is beyond what I want to commit too. Plus, my eyesight is not as good as it once was.

Are you still planning on doing the other two UPC related posts before you leave?

I would check your homeowner’s insurance carefully. It probably doesn’t cover copyright infringement. I know someone whose homeowner policy covered his tangle with Scientology, but it cast the insurance co. over $3 million. The issue was an alleged infringement because the guy had posted the cult’s sekrit skripchers to the Internet. You know, the ones that will give you pneumonia and you’ll die if you read them. The reality is that you might get pneumonia from aspirating a drink while laughing while reading those things.

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As for starting my own blog, not likely at present. I moved to a management position three months ago, and I have less free time in my life. That said, it was a tradeoff for getting out of a job that had become completely untenable. I do like my new job but it’s cat herding engineers, developers and analysts all day, every day toward solutions for production issues. It has its moments.

I’m a long-time reader and rare commenter on this blog. I’ve been thinking of starting my own blog because I am walking through my own history of childhood sexual abuse, but I haven’t done it because I don’t think I could post regularly and because I’m not sure I want to commit to doing something regularly for the sake of my mental health. One thing I’d like to do is to critically read and review Christian resources on sexual abuse–I think this could be revealing and helpful–but I don’t think I can take on the sole responsibility for something. I have the beginnings of a review of Dan Allender’s book “The Wounded Heart” saved in a Google Doc, but I haven’t done anything with it for the above reasons. I’d definitely be interested in collaborating with others, though. I don’t know if that’s a possibility, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Muslin, fka Dee Holmes,

I can’t imagine any insurance WOULD cover copyright infringement. The only way to be in the clear on that is basically to source materials with immense precision and never, ever monetize your blog or use a platform that is monetized. I recall MH tried to go after Throckmorton on copyright infringement claims because when he was on Patheos (which I despise, personally) there were lots of adds. MHC leadership never tried to do anything of the kind to me, and I made it clear year after year I would never monetize the blog and was doing things because I was tackling things I believed the conventional press wasn’t covering. I also did get advice, and the advice I got was that Fair Use was developed for the kind of stuff I was writing about the former MHC.

I was a journalism major back in college so I had a pretty good grounding on what I could reasonably do and had best avoid dealing with limited public figures. Private figures have a lot more restrictions about what’s considered acceptable to publish. Find out what the legal precedents are for public figures, limited public figures and private citizens in your state and the state(s) of figures you intend to blog about. Read up on what is and isn’t considered a legitimate Fair Use defense.

Something else that may be helpful to keep in mind, it’s safest to stick to blogging about things that the limited public figure has made public. If limited public figure A discusses X and you talk about Y you could land yourself in legal trouble commenting about Y if A has never talked about that topic in a public way. I was pretty careful to stick to commenting on things that were disseminated in mass media or social media and because Mark Driscoll was so prolific in opining and commenting on things it was never difficult to find what he had to say on a topic.

With that specific example in mind, screen cap often and archive steadily. You may find that people try to purge content once they realize their contributions to the public record are being tracked. Justin Dean has broached this issue a few times in podcast interviews, on when and why a church may want to purge social media content in the wake of a scandal.

Most of what I blog lately is related to music, musicology and the arts but I was still doing that during the peak years of documenting MH. It can help to change gears with a blog and some friends told me that MHC found it perplexing that for a few weeks there’d be reams of damaging leaks about MHC showing up at Wenatchee The Hatchet and then, all of a sudden, there’d be lengthy discourse on anime and Powerpuff Girls episodes. Diversity of content can do more than just let a blogger take a needed break, one of the canards about “bloggers” is that “all” they do is rip on church X or preacher Y.

having managed to go through six or seven years blogging about MHC and coming out the other side without having been threatened by its leadership in any way I hope I’ve picked up some experience and observations that bloggers might find helpful. Be careful and research the law but don’t be afraid to start documenting what you believe needs documenting.