Supreme court to hear internet defamation dispute - The Irish Times - Thu, Apr 03, 2014
I had blogged previously on the lack of clarity that surrounds the law on defamation on the internet in Ireland (and to a lesser extent in the UK), when lawyers for Angela Kerins rather remarkably threatened Irishcentral.com for speculating on what Ms. Kerins' salary is (information that was subsequently made public just a few weeks later).
According to today's Irish Times we may get some clarity on some of the issues, though given the backlog of cases awaiting hearing before the Supreme Court quite when that might be is still unclear.
The case is an appeal from the decision in McKeogh v Facebook & Ors. in which a student was incorrectly identified in a YouTube video as having failed to pay a taxi fare, and his name was bandied about on Facebook, YouTube and a number of different forums, in the process of which he was "seriously and nastily defamed" in the words of the trial judge.
(If you are getting a weird message below, ignore it and click where it says 'here' to read the judgment).
I mentioned in the original post that I was not aware of any Irish decisions that litigated the key issues, such as whether an ISP or web host is a publisher, and the extent to which Article 14 of the E-Commerce Directive provides them protection. This case would appear to address these issues, but the appeal is against the interim injunctions that were put in place over two years ago (Irish 'justice' moves embarrassingly slowly), a full hearing of the issues being stayed until the appeals against the injunctive relief are heard.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will take the opportunity to lay down guidelines which can be applied if and when the substantive claim gets heard.
Nonetheless, any further clarification of the responsibilities and liabilities of web hosts and bloggers with regard to potentially defamatory material is to be welcomed.
The sooner this case gets a hearing the better.
Showing posts with label defamation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defamation. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 April 2014
Friday, 21 February 2014
Chilling effect on the internet?
This story originally caught my attention when I saw a tweet from Niall O'Dowd as I boarded a plane for a week's holiday in the U.S. Virgin Islands (that's not relevant to this post, I just like rubbing it in).
@NiallODowd Have you taken down the John Spain article?
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) February 15, 2014
O'Dowd's tweet linked to a story in Irish Central (his U.S.-based news website), outlining the circumstances under which a story by John Spain relating to the salary of the Chief Executive of the Irish charity REHAB had been taken down after legal threats from Ms. Kerins' solicitors. I have made reference to Angela Kerins in a previous post here (REHAB this week released her salary, just FYI: €240,000. No, I did not accidentally slip on an extra digit.)
O'Dowd stated that the site's host, Clickability, had been warned to take down the story, but didn't actually say that it had been taken down (which would have been, from a legal perspective, a very surprising decision on their part.) After having read the story I was surprised to notice that the story O'Dowd was referring to was no longer on the site, particularly given O'Dowd's statement in the article "Thank God for the First Amendment" and so tweeted to him asking about it. I received no reply, so was therefore interested to see this article in Tuesday's Irish Times.
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