Wayne Crookes cyber-libel dismissal upheld
p2pnet news | Freedom:- A lower court decision dismissing an online libel suit launched by Vancouver businessman Wayne Crookes against Yahoo!, MySpace, and a group of bloggers has been upheld by the British Columbia Court of Appeal, says Ottawa law professor and columnist Michael Geist.
“The court rejected the view that a court should presume that something posted online on a restricted access site has been widely read by people in the local community,” he says.
Yahoo was sued by Crookes, together with Wikimedia, Pbwiki, MySpace, Openpolitics.ca, Domains by Proxy, Michael Pilling, Hayley Easton, Kate Holloway, Craig Hubley, Frank Cameron, Catharine Johannson, Gareth White, various anonymous personages and, most recently, Geist, p2pnet posted a little under a year ago, going on:
“p2pnet, already targeted by Sharman Networks, is also named.
“Crookes, whose case against Warren De Simone was recently dismissed, claims linking to links which link to items which displease him amounts to defamation.”
The BC Supreme Court dismissed with costs one of the Crookes libel lawsuits, Geist said in September, 2007, going on >>>
The suit against Yahoo!, MySpace and a group of individual defendants, which centred on postings on a Yahoo Groups forum, was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. Yahoo successfully argued that it was not subject to B.C. jurisdiction in this case since it has no offices in Canada (as opposed to Yahoo Canada), is not registered to do business in Canada, and does not maintain servers for Yahoo Groups in Canada.
Given the lack of connection to Canada, the court ruled that Crookes needed to demonstrate that the alleged defamation was committed here. In order to do so, he needed to show that the allegedly defamatory postings were “accessed, downloaded, and read by someone in British Columbia.” The judge concluded that Crookes failed to tender such evidence and therefore dismissed the case. Other arguments – including a real and substantial connection analysis or the jurisdictional clause in the Yahoo terms of use were not addressed by the court.”
Crookes’ case against me is still pending.
(Thanks, Luvie)
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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May 10th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Let’s hope he goes bankrupt because of the legal costs.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
any link on the original post or a copy of that what pissed him off ?
May 11th, 2008 at 5:21 am
just type ,
Wayne Crooks, Douche … into your favorite search engine.
you’ll find it.
The point of his suit was to erase it from history ( at least from the smaller blogs
that couldn’t afford to fight him back ). A failed attempt at economic censorship.
A quick search will show just how much ‘fail’ he has
May 11th, 2008 at 5:23 am
oops, .. make that ..
Wayne Crookes, Douche.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:34 am
ITS ALWAYS A RUMOR
No one should sue anyone for difamation. Let me illustrate why with an example which probably hs never happened.
Harry says in public that Tom served time in prision for robbing a bank and for bigamy, something that is not true.
Tom’s employer, a bank fires Tom after hearing about Tom’s non existent conviction, A RUMOR. Tom’s wife also left him after hearing the rumor.
Should Tom sue Harry for defamation? Of course not. It is the bank that is guilty of something. That something be best described as being unfair and acting without thinking. The bank should have given Tom a chance to explain or to deny the acusation. Ditto for the wife.
True most people, given the chance, will act unfairly after hearing a defamatory comment, better called a rumor.
Also, most people are RUMOR MONGERS and the laws and the courts cannot change that part of human nature.
The best reaction to defamatry rumors is to igoner the rumor, laugh it off, pardon thy ignorant brothers.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:51 am
All of Crookes’ lawsuits remain. This ruling only affirms that a portion of one case is thrown out.
See http://section15.blogspot.com/2008/05/crookes-lawsuits-are-not-dismissed.html for more.
As a Crookes defendant, this helps me, but he still has one claim against me: that a wiki I helped manage had a link to a page which had a link on it (one of many) which linked to a site Crookes has some objection to.
Though we know that Crookes has objections to some content out there, we don’t know which specific facts are in dispute.