Online defamation in Canada vs the US
p2pnet news | Freedom:- “A new site had just published English translations from the blog under fire,” says a p2pnet Reader’s Write to Google to reveal blogger’s IP address.
The comment post goes on:
The link is: http://shaarei-tikva.behirot.net.
It looks like the bloggers allegations were mostly true. I got an impression that those 3 local politicians have a lot to hide.
Telling about local politicians taking bribes is a criminal offense? We all will be in jail very soon.
The story the p2pnet reader refers to kicks off by saying Google has promised to hand over the IP address of an Israeli who ran ‘Google Blogger’ on which he, “slandered Shaarei Tikva council members running for reelection,” says Globes Online.
“The slandered Shaarei Tikva council members asked Google for the blogger’s name,” says the story.
“They reached a settlement with the company on the basis of an Israeli ruling on the subject. The settlement stipulates that 72 hours before a hearing on the case at the Rishon LeZion Magistrates Court, the council members would leave the blogger a message on his blog summoning him to the hearing, or else his IP address would be handed over.”
Now shaarei-tikva.behirot.net/ links to a New York Times article which says if an elected official claims he’s been defamed by an anonymous blogger, “he cannot use a lawsuit to unmask the writer unless he has substantial evidence to prove his claim”.
That standard, the court said, “will more appropriately protect against the chilling effect on anonymous First Amendment Internet speech that can arise when plaintiffs bring trivial defamation lawsuits primarily to harass or unmask their critics”.
Land of the Golden Defamation
I found this particularly interesting living, as I do, in Canada, the land of the Golden Defamation.
Here, anything goes.
I’m being sued for defamation by a guy named Wayne Crookes, who lives on the British Columbia mainland (I live on Vancouver Island, 1.5 hours away by ferry); and, by Nikki Hemming, the woman who runs Sharman Network’s Kazaa P2P file sharing application (the one which keeps on showing up in the spurious RIAA sue ‘em all file sharing cases being waged by RIAA-owners Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG against their own customers) which is itself the subject of a class action.
As seasoned Vancouver media lawyer Dan Burnett, who’s representing me pro bono in both cases, recently wrote:
For all the lofty quotes about free speech in Canadian jurisprudence, the reality is that our libel laws are the least protective of free speech in the English speaking world.
Libel law developed in an ancient era which we would today consider backward, tyrannical and repressive. It is rooted in 16th and 17th century criminal statutes protecting nobility from criticism.
Comcast notified the blogger
In the American case cited by the NYT and shaarei-tikva.behirot.net, Patrick Cahill, a councilman in Smyrna, Delaware, demanded the identity of a blogger who in a September 2004 posting, “praised the mayor but said Mr. Cahill was divisive and had ‘an obvious mental deterioration’.”
The story goes on:
In a second posting, the blogger, named John Doe in the suit, wrote that Mr. Cahill ‘is as paranoid as everyone in the town thinks he is,’ according to court records.
Using a court order, Mr. Cahill learned from the publisher of the blog, Independent Newspapers, that the Web address of the blogger belonged to a customer of Comcast. When Mr. Cahill demanded the person’s identity, Comcast notified the blogger, as required by law. The blogger filed for a protective order. A lower court judge denied the request, and the blogger appealed.
In a 33-page opinion, the five justices reversed the lower court, saying the judge used a standard that was incorrect because it was not stringent enough. The court said, ‘The Internet provides a means of communication where a person wronged by statements of an anonymous poster can respond instantly, can respond to the alleged defamatory statements on the same site or blog, and thus, can, almost contemporaneously, respond to the same audience that initially read the allegedly defamatory statements.’
Good thing the blogger doesn’t live in Canada. If he did, he’d be up excreta creek without a means of propelling himself.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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