Tony Sidaway wrote:
Ray Saintonge said:
Many Wikipedians do not edit under their own
names.
What standards of evidence do the British courts follow when the
defence is simply, "It wasn't I who said that." The burden of proof
lies with the plaintiff, and someone needs to accept responsibility
for the costs to a defendant who has been misidentified.
The burden of proof lies with the plaintiff in establishing that the
defendant made the edits, but this is decided on the balance of
probabilities. A reasonably resourceful plaintiff could track down most
Wikipedia editors easily enough.
Probably. Still there would be questions about whether retaining the
material in the archives would be continued publication. Edits are
constantly being replaced, and removal from immediate access. The
definition of publisher under the UK Defamation Act is also interesting.
."publisher" means a commercial publisher,
that is, a person whose
business is issuing material to the public, or a section of the
public, who issues material containing the statement in the course of
that business.
But the neat thing about the UK system, from the
plaintiff's point of
view, is that he can sue the website. If he notifies the website of the
problem and they don't take it down fairly promptly, they're wide open.
Not doing this in 1997 (in that case, in relation to a Usenet post that
wasn't even made on their servers) cost Demon Internet a lawsuit, which
eventually led to about USD 1,000,000 settlement, plus whatever costs they
incurred in a lawsuit that dragged on for over a year.
FOr the purposes of defamation in UK law, a website is a publisher.
The case in US law is very different because of the CDA 230(c)(1).
The damages awarded in Godfrey v. Demon were £15,000. The legal costs
awarded at £250,000 seem to be completely out of proportion to the
damages, so I would be curious about the British procedure for taxing
costs. Where does the USD 1,000,000 exageration come from?
The Godfrey case begins with an admission that this is a new matter for
the British courts. The decision is a trial decision with no appeal
apparently undertaken. It would be interesting to see how much of the
decision would survive an appeal.
The defendants in this case were a UK company, so how this might have
been reciprocally enforced against a US company did not arise.
Nevertheless US courts are loath to enforce foreign orders which they
see as violating the first amendment rights of a defendant.
Ec