“I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.”
~ Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire
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The Toronto Online Freedom of Speech Round Table and Fundraiser is a week away today.

Rob Hyndman will be chairing the Round Table and the panel will include Michael Pilling of OpenPolitics.ca, which has also been sued for online libel, Jason Young of Deeth Williams Wall, Russell McOrmond of Digital Copyright Canada, and me, Jon Newton.

Details on the campaign are here. Details on the roundtable are here, and on the Rivoli event are here. A press release with further information is here, and there’s a wiki here.

I’ll also be reading out a comments from CIPPIC (the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic), BC media lawyer Dan Burnett who’s representing me, and Jason Munning of America’s Ten Mile Tide, the former Kazaa poster band which dropped its association with Sharman Networks and put its albums online for free to protest the libel action.

If you live in Toronto, please help us out. Run off a few copies of the flyer below and hand them out.

Because Nikki Hemming, ceo of the Kazaa p2p file sharing application - Yes, that Kazaa, the one that’s just aligned itself with the corporate entertainment cartels which are trying to blackmail and sue people around the world into buying ‘product’ - is suing p2pnet for libel.

Until recently Kazaa owner Sharman Networks of Australia was also suing p2pnet, but it dropped out leaving Hemming by herself.

And Yes, this is the same Kazaa which used to cynically claim to be in the side of the p2p community.

But as we say on the Stop-the-lawsuit blog, although the Kazaa Kase 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?

If Sharman/Kazaa win, 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.

Freedom of speech isn’t free - in any sense of the word - in Canada.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason…

There can be no right of speech where any man…[is] compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.

Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”

~Frederick Douglass, plea for free speech in Boston 1860

Cheers! And thanks to everyone for getting behind this.

Help me beat the lawsuit

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 9:19 am 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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