On 12/17/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
We still have the odd cases like Gregory Lauder-Frost where the office action was the result of his legal advisors stating that we could not mention his conviction for fraud because of the UK's Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. That demands actual legal advice. As it happens, the Act only prevents "spent" convictions being mentioned in a defamatory way, there is no apparent restriction on coverage in a neutral, independent biography, and his friends did not help his case by initially including the case but claiming that he had been cleared on appeal - it was possible (though certainly not trivial) to verify that this was simply not true, and it was only when we included the citations to back up the conviction and failed appeal that they pulled the office stunt.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. How would Wiki[m/p]edia, in the United States, be subject to a law in the United Kingdom? Just because some country has a law that would prevent Wikipedia from stating something about some particular topic doesn't mean Wikipedia has to follow it. If we followed North Korean or Chinese or Iranian laws on free speech, I have the feeling some of our articles would be pretty blank. :-)
Or should we even try discussing that, because most of us aren't lawyers?