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EVANSTON, Ill. -- The Internet opened new doors not only for news gathering and storytelling but also for a host of potential legal traps, experts said at the Online News Association conference.

The panel on law and online news began with an examination of the best practices for handling retractions and corrections in stories.

"With the Web and its ability to immediately update, you shouldn't have erroneous information up for very long," said Jonathan Hart, an attorney at Dow, Lohnes & Albertson in Washington and the author of Law of the Web: A Field Guide to Internet Publishing.

Hart moderated the panel, which included David Barlow, senior counsel for Tribune Co., Stuart Karle, associate general counsel for Dow Jones & Co., Inc. and Steven Rosenboro, assistant general counsel for Cox Enterprises, Inc.

Most panelists said their sites had established places for publishing corrections, either through an archive or with a standing correction box on the home page.

The Wall Street Journal leaves a trail showing the correction(s) in the archives "to show how we messed it up," said Karle.

Consistency is the key when dealing with errors, the attorneys said. Whatever a news site does, it must do it in every case.

Errors can be costly, as a recent defamation case showed. Barron's, a U.S. publication, was sued in Australia for something that appeared on its Web site. Under U.S. law, jurisdiction for lawsuits is determined by where the story is published and where the audience resides. In Australia, it is determined by wherever the story is downloaded.

In Australia, wherever somebody reads a story becomes the legal jurisdiction, Karle said. "You don't know as journalist what law will apply to you."

Unedited weblogs are another potential minefield for news organizations. Without editing, less-scrupulous bloggers can generate a host of errors and defamation lawsuits for sites. "It's a suicide pact," Karle said of sites hosting unedited blogs.

Section 230, one of the few remaining clauses of the now-defunct Communications Decency Act, was hailed by the panel as the savior of online outlets. That law created immunity for Internet service providers against liability for the acts of third parties in which they exercise no editorial control. Hart and Rosenboro said recent court decisions were slowly chipping away at Section 230 protections.

"Congress was unequivocal about 230," said Hart. "It was supposed to create uniform results." Karle said courts have been uneven in deciding what's covered by the law, which causes problems for online news providers. "We just don't know what's protected and what's not," he said.

What journalists do or do not have a right to use was a topic that generated strong interest from the audience. The fair use provisions of older copyright laws and the restrictions established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act created an extra level of protection for publishers distributing their own work but added consternation for news organizations wishing to use others' work.

A final thought from the group of legal experts was to ask the journalists in attendance to temper their views on anti-spam and anti-telemarketing laws and not be too hasty in passing judgment.

"Does the fact that something is a nuisance make it something that should be banned?" asked Hart. "Free speech is at issue here, and as journalists we must always be wary of limiting it."