p2p news / p2pnet: When I logged on this morning, I had quite a few emails waiting, and they were all asking if everything was OK. Because p2pnet went offline last night and hadn’t reappeared by 4:00 am Pacific, when I booted up. In fact, it was a couple of more hours after that before normal service was resumed and meanwhile, had Kazaa owner Sharman Networks and Kazaa ceo Nikki Hemming at last figured out a way to hammer p2pnet?

“Did they get you?” – asked a German reader; “if kazaa gets away with this well make then regret it,” said another from Australia; and, “Woke up this morning and did my usual reading of web sites,” said a friend in Canada. “Your site won’t come up though. I either get an error for your DNS entry, or it gives the standard ‘The page cannot be displayed’. I hope all is ok! Your site is now our standard reading, and we need our daily dose of Jonisms ”

Sharman and Hemming want to sue p2pnet for alleged libel, and I’m fighting the attempt.

As I say on Stop-the-Blogsuit, launched to help me deal with the case:

Although the Sharman / Hemming suit appears to be a straight defamation claim, what’s really on trial is whether or not an online publication – a blog – can be held responsible for something someone else posts. Or put another way, is a blog in reality a content filter acting on behalf of persons unknown?

And there’s something else: as far as I’m concerned, an anonymous post is the same as a confidential source. I don’t have to like a post, or even agree with it. But I believe that as an honest and responsible human being, I do have to safeguard the poster, if indeed I know who he or she is which in this case, I don’t.

If Sharman wins it’ll make life a potential hell for bloggers in Canada, at the least. And you can bet the case will be used as a reference for similar actions around the world.”

Because that really is where it’s at. If Sharman and Hemming win, no Canadian web site will be safe. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, with a grudge will be able to trample our free speech rights with virtual impunity,

Never happen! – you say? Wrong. It’s already happening to p2pnet. And I’m up against a company with millions of dollars behind it. But thankfully, well-known Canadian media attorney Dan Burnett is in my corner, and offers of help have also come in from two other Canadian lawyers. More on that later.

For now, “The suit is a little odd, since P2PNet.net is a champion of peer-to-peer file-sharing, which is the same business that Kazaa is in,” as Jack Kapica recently wrote in his The Globe & Mail tech column.

In the US, Apple recently lost the fight in which it had tried to use the American legal system to force the disclosure of the identities of people who’d anonymously written material it didn’t like.

The court was, “supportive of the proposition that online journalists should be entitled to constitutional protections, stating that ‘we can see no sustainable basis to distinguish petitioners [the online journalists] from the reporters, editors, and publishers who provide news to the public through traditional print and broadcast media’,” blogged Canadian law professor and Net expert Dr Michael Geist in a column featured by The Toronto Star in Canada, as well as the BBC in the UK.

He went to quote the court as deciding, “It is established without contradiction that they [online journalists] gather, select, and prepare, for purposes of publication to a mass audience, information about current events of interest and concern to that audience.”

Now, “The reverberations from the Apple case may soon resonate in Canada, particularly given the recent spate of lawsuits against Canadian online news sites,” stated Geist. “A former director of the Green Party of Canada recently sued OpenPolitics.ca, a B.C.-based political chat site, after he objected to several comments posted on the site. Similarly, p2pnet.net, based in B.C., is facing a lawsuit ironically filed by Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file sharing system, that itself has been dragged through the courts in Australia.”

For the moment, no worries. p2pnet’s downtime was caused by server problems with Shaw, my Canadian ISP.

Whatever happens with the Sharman / Hemming case, I’ll be doing everything I can to draw attention to Canada’s dangerous, out-of-date libel laws. And I really hope others – a lot of others – will do the same. Because if we don’t get them changed, freedom of speech in Canada will be in an even worse state than it is already and bloggers will be gagged every time they say something someone doesn’t like.

Finally, a recent editorial on another site said, “Although many file-sharers are uncomfortable supporting p2pnet as the beacon of free speech, the alternative of supporting Sharman Networks is unthinkable – especially when memories of disruptive third party software are still fresh.”

As I responded, “I’ve never claimed, and am not now claiming, to be the (or even ‘a’) beacon for free speech.

“What I AM saying is Canada’s libel are antiquated and must be revised if Canadians can enjoy the freedom of being able to blog and post without fear. If Sharman wins, it’ll have a serious chilling effect on blogging not only in Canada, but also elsewhere in the world.”

So no matter what happens with the libel suit, I’ll continue to do everything within my power to keep this in the public eye, and I promise every penny donated will go towards this, and nothing else, and that I’ll account publicly in detail for all expenditures and expenses.

Help p2pnet beat the Sharman / Hemming lawsuit

If you don’t like PayPal, here’s an address:

Jon Newton
PO Box 1532, Lake Cowichan
British Columbia V0R 2G0

So Cheers! And thanks for all your help and support …

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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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