Blogs, Libel and Contempt of Court.

Just a useful little reminder of how the law works for online publications from the Guardian:

In a different and less dramatic instance we had a similar issue with the Peter Falconio murder trial in Australia, where the judge's strictures on what can and cannot appear in the Northern Territories' media are severe. To all intents and purposes this means that we too are affected by these seemingly "local" judgments.

If the paper carried details of the trial allowed outside but not inside the restricted area then legal changes must be made to articles before they appear on the web. The potential implications of prejudicing a lengthy trial because of a contempt do not bear thinking about. But legal deletions add a burden to our production desk and also to the Guardian's legal team.

As a newspaper's archive on a free website is generally available then, from a defamation perspective, a story can be deemed by court to be published every time someone downloads it. There can be legal issues, too, in relation to criminal cases. In the case a few years ago involving the retrial of Leeds footballers Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer, this meant removing from our database all articles relating to the case for the duration of the trial. Once you have removed something wholesale from your own site there is the issue of it sitting on other blogs or in the search engines of sites such as Google - from which you can request, but not always obtain, a deletion.

If this applies to online newspapers it applies to blogs as well. We are governed by the law in the jurisdiction where our pieces are downloaded and read, not where we write or host them.

There are some differences for people in the US, in that courts there have been unlikely to aid in the imposition of a judgement they consider unfair....the UK libel laws being a case in point. It’s also pretty unlikely that a UK court, for example, would enforce a judgement from a North Korean court. But for places within the EU? Germany has a law against holocaust denial and a piece writtien on a UK blog and read in Germany would most certainly breach that and could (although whether it would is something else) be enforced. Revealing, before it had been outed in the European Parliament, that the current French Commissioner to the European Union had a conviction (was it bribery or fraud?) similarly.

And as the Guardian points out, this applies to the Google cache and the various archives of the web. Gonna get interesting one of these days, someone’s going to get dragged up for one of these things.