p2pnet news | Freedom:- With demands for ISPs to police the Net in the background, a UK lawyer has revived calls for an online code of conduct.

An anonymous news and discussion site agreed to pay £100,000 (about $157,338) compensation, “following a campaign of defamation and harassment,” says the Guardian.

“Gentoo, formerly the Sunderland Housing Group, became the subject of an attack by ‘a seriously defamatory, abusive and scurrilous anonymous website at dadsplace.co.uk’,” says the story.

Ashley Hurst, acting for Gentoo and company CEO Peter Walls, called for a code of conduct for web publishers.

“It is difficult to see how the government can legislate effectively in this area because technology moves faster than the courts and there are always new technical loopholes to exploit,” Hurst is quoted as saying, going on:

“But one option may be to develop the remit of the Press Complaints Commission, or develop a voluntary code of conduct so that at least reputable websites can distinguish themselves from the rogue ones by signing up to the code as a badge of credibility.”

Last year, “As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference,” said Kathy Sierram on her site, Creating Passionate Users. “But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog.”

“Sierra is a close friend of Tim O’Reilly and the latter decided her experience was enough to encourage him to call for an Online Code of Conduct, an appeal backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who quickly followed up with suggestions for his own code,” said p2pnet.

Nothing has been heard since.

Slashdot it!

police the Net – ‘We’re not copyright cops’: UK ISP, April 5, 2008
Guardian – Record online libel damages awarded, April 3, 2008
death threat comments – Net Code of Conduct vs Flames, May 8th, 2007

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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