The Media Bloggers Association was started in 2004 as an attempt to use the ability of blogs to shine a bright light on unwarranted legal threats and the use of litigation or the threat of litigation as a club with wish to suppress blogger's free speech rights. The animating event was my own experience with a case similar to this one when the New York Times sought to use the DMCA to shut down by blog which they succeeded, briefly, in doing, before re-thinking their actions in the wake of a blog storm which was, to the best of my knowledge, the first such blog storm in response to a legal threat against a blogger, a storm which spilled over into the traditional media with accounts appearing in print publications, primarily newspapers, and on national radio and television. Initially the volume of cases was low and back then it was possible to find enough lawyers to provide enough legal support to help. For high profile cases like the Apple cases there were organizations like the EFF. By 2006, as the volume of cases began to mount, it became apparent that this type of legal support system for bloggers was untenable. The need was present and growing but supply was not keeping up with demand. Foreseeing that the MBA's ad hoc approach was not sustainable over the long-term, and firm in the conviction that a vibrant citizen media was impossible without the ability to push back effectively in all cases against encroachments on blogger speech, I began to work actively on the idea of creating blogger liability insurance something first considered at the inception of the Media Bloggers Association and advocated forcefully by Jeff Jarvis at the time. For some reason the comments on that post are offline but in them you would have seen that I responded to Jeff in taking up that call and reporting what I learned by calling around to a dozen insurance companies - that insurance companies did not offer such a product and that the only option at the time would be to self-insure and hire an insurance company to administer the program. To do this would require coming up with an impossible minimum amount of $2,000,000. That was a no-go.
In 2006, knowing of my interest, Jeff introduced me to Leib Dodell the CEO of Media Pro Insurance about the time Laura Parker wrote a story for USA TODAY, Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers, websites. Dodell invited me to come address over 500 insurance industry executives at the Professional Liability Underwriter Society conference in November, 2006. Over the next 18 months, the MBA worked with Media Pro to try to come up with an insurance program for bloggers which would include more than just insurance coverage - education, online legal resources, a lawyer referral service for insured members and a legal hotline for insured members, and, in the event of a claim, coverage to pay for both legal defense work and to pay of settlements and judgements. Just a couple of weeks ago, at the Journalism that matters conference in Minneapolis, a satellite event to the much larger Media Reform Conference, we unveiled the result of our efforts and solicited feedback on the underwriting guidelines that had been developed so they could be modified based on the input of attendees including Bill Densmore of Media Giraffe, David Ardia of Citizen Media Law Project, Tish Grier of Placebloggers, Josh Wolf, Dan Gillmor, Michael Tippet of NowPublic and many others. We plan to gather additional input before rolling out the product on August 1st.
