What many don't know is that under an old Colorado law, police can charge you with a crime if you write something hurtful about someone else.
In 2003, Tom Mink, a student at the University of Northern Colorado, got a visit from police after offending a professor with his blog.
"They decided to serve me with a search warrant," Mink said. "They had actually accessed my email records and pinned down my name and location, came to my house and seized my computer."
Mink was looking at potentially a year in prison because of this old blog page called the "Howling Pig." Here's an archived version of the old blog.(Warning: offensive language.)
The site was essentially a satirical ranting newsletter Mink and some friends put online.
On the blog, he doctored a photo of UNC economics professor Junius Peake and renamed him "Junius Puke."
The fictitious "Puke" was a mascot of sorts, acting as the "editor" of the Howling Pig.
The real professor (who has since passed away) was furious and complained to police, who investigated Mink for criminal libel.
In most states libel is a civil offense, which means you have to sue over it.
The ACLU helped Mink sue Weld County in federal court, which found the law unconstitutional, but did not strike it down because prosecutors never filed charges.
Just last year, the county settled for $425,000.
There are other problems with Colorado's criminal libel law.
The U.S. Supreme Court decided that the person who's been harmed has to prove the offending statements are false in a libel suit. The Colorado law makes a person guilty for writing something true that exposes a person's "natural defects" or "blackens the memory of the dead."
"Anybody with a Facebook account, you're almost certainly committing a felony at any given point," Mink said.
A bill to simply repeal criminal libel passed in the Colorado Senate and cleared a House committee Thursday afternoon. Both votes were unanimous.
Supporters of the bill point out that the criminal libel law was enacted in 1883 to combat a real problem at the time: dueling.
Criminal libel allowed people to have a person arrested rather than challenge them to a gunfight.
Dueling is already illegal under Colorado law.
