Defamation and the blogosphere

The High Court in England has awarded libel damages of £10,000 to a Mr Keith Smith after he brought an action against a Tracy Williams for defaming him in an internet chatroom. The Times carries the story here, and comment from a media lawyer who chastises the Court for being behind the curve, again.

Libel actions should be about correcting a wrong, where one party is all-powerful and the other not. We should have a more egalitarian approach to how we impose libel law in cyberspace and not destroy the vibrancy of the internet.

Update: Tim W looks in some more details at the issues raised here. Also, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (see right) has a good - albeit US-based - guide to blogging and the law.

Comments

[The Pedant-General]

I struggle to see how this can work in practice:

you toddle off to an internet cafe and sign up to blogger and hotmail using a nom-de-plume.

From there, you post to your blog via emails from hotmail, yahoo or some other web-based free mail provider.

This becomes virtually impossible to trace even from an IP perspective.

Wouldn't it?

[Arthur Seat]

Apparently the lady in question used an e-alias, but the plaintiff had his lawyers track her down...In principle, you'd be right, but do you know who is watching..?

[The Pedant-General]

Comments to a post are possibly easier as the relevant site would v likely have the IP address of the commenter at the time.

My suggestion is that, in order to do the same to a blog post, the plaintiff would have to convince a large number of organisations to violate the privacy of their customers just to get back to an IP address in the first place, before the real investigation could begin.

i.e. lawyers have to strong arm blogger to get the original email that made the post to find out the sender's address.

They then have to strong arm hotmail to unravel the account, only to find that it was an auto-forward in which case the owner of the account might not necessarily be liable. They have to find out where the auto-forwarded mail came from, which means that they have to strong arm yahoo etc. etc.

If nothing else, this puts one hell of a lot of cost onto the plaintiff even before they can find someone to sue...

Then I suppose you could ensure that you included the occasional Nauruan mail provider or something where the specific offense didn't exist. (or something, you're the lawyer.)