Libel Freeze

I seldom agree with anything George Monbiot writes including the prepositions but he nails British libel law right here:

Perhaps you don’t live in England or Wales, so you think this has nothing to do with you. You’re wrong. English libel law now applies to everyone on Earth. Make any accusation, anywhere in the world, and if the subject can demonstrate that a single person in England or Wales has read it, you could be sued here for every penny, cent, rouble, rupee or renminbi you possess. The internet and the global nature of publishing ensure that these medieval laws have become the most powerful extra-territorial legislation ever drafted. the guardian

In other libel freeze news Loreena McKennitt uses the British Courts to shut down a book about here…not because it is not substantially true but rather because it infringed upon her privacy. (Thanks Kathy!)

Written by jay on July 15th, 2008 with 3 comments.
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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com dailybayonet
#1. July 16th, 2008, at 4:43 AM.

The US Senate is looking at a law that will prevent the US courts from enforcing foreign legal decisions, I wrote about it yesterday (link in my URL). Senators Specter and Lieberman were in the WSJ, and they specifically singled out the UK system as a problem.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com truewest
#2. July 16th, 2008, at 5:45 PM.

Jay,
Last I looked, the word “news” referred to recent events. The McKennitt decision came down nearly 2 1/2 years ago. There’s a lesson here - don’t trust anyone who, like Shaidle, boasts that she isn’t bound by journalistic ethics because she is a “polemicist” (Apparently, she understands the term to mean a racist religious nut and hack journalist. But I digress.) Last I looked, one element of journalistic ethics was a concern for accuracy, something that has clearly never troubled Ms. Five Feet of Fuck Up.

As for Monbiot, while England has become a favourite destination for libel tourism, he does rather overstate the situation. English courts are not going to bankrupt someone for a post that was read by a single person (indeed, they may well decline jurisdiction) and, in any case, they are several years ahead of Canada in the modernization of defamation law.

Speaking of overstating the case, your first commenter does just that in describing the Leiberman/Spector bill, which doesn’t actually prevent US courts from enforcing foreign judgments but only from enforcing foreign libel judgments that are not consistent with American libel law. .

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com ic
#3. July 16th, 2008, at 11:08 PM.

The Leiberman/Spector bill allows award of triple damages to the defendant if the libel lawsuit was found frivolous and intended to intimidate the defendant. Defendants are allowed counter-suits.

truewest: English courts … may well decline jurisdiction

How magnanimous! English courts should never have jurisdiction over non-British subjects outside British land. They don’t have jurisdiction over murder cases outside Britain even if the victims were Brits. For that matter, they don’t even have juridiction inside Britain over Putin’s murder of his former spy, and over so-called “honor” killings.

Btw, why don’t they just disallow Brits from accessing foreign sites? Get some pointers from the Chinese.

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