Britain: Libel laws used to curb web protests. Big businesses are using
Britain's libel laws to shut down websites set up by disgruntled customers
or protest groups, a report by the Government's advisers on law reform has
found.
Preliminary findings by the Law Commissioners of England and Wales released
on December 18 show there are real concerns that the libel laws are being
used by firms and their lawyers to restrict the right to freedom of
expression on the internet.
The commission found that the law put Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
under pressure to remove sites as soon as they were told the material on
them might be defamatory, without considering whether the information was
in the public interest, or true.
Information published on the internet is subject to the same libel laws
that apply to newspapers and the broadcast media. There is no special
immunity for the authors of defamatory statements made on a bulletin board
or for websites that carry libellous claims.
Report from the Independent.
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20021219_britain.shtml
Have to get those webcams in soon,real soon.
United States: Different stand on online libel. In sharp contrast to this
month's controversial Australian court ruling theoretically allowing
internet libel cases to be heard anywhere in the world, a US court of
appeal took the diametrically opposite view, refusing a litigant permission
to sue two papers in another US state.
PCWorld.com reported the ruling on November 19 that the two Connecticut
papers could not be sued for libel in Virginia, simply based on the fact
that the contentious stories were available in Virginia via the papers' Web
sites.
The U.S. judges cited precedent set by an earlier case that found that
jurisdiction could only be granted to another state if the publication
specifically targeted an audience in that state. "A person's act of placing
information on the Internet is not sufficient by itself to subject that
person to personal jurisdiction in every state in which the information is
accessed," the judges wrote.
The decision is counter to a ruling issued by the Australian High Court on
a similar libel case, which did grant jurisdiction for U.S.-based publisher
Dow Jones to be sued in an Australian court.
PCWorld.com report.
