On 7/14/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
It may be in English wikipedians best interests to not contribute to the article if there's any doubt about the legal implications. I am sure we can find non-British editors willing to deal with it.
British courts have shown an unfortunate willingness to ignore the nationality of defendants in Internet defamation cases, incidentally. I wouldn't be so quick to prescribe this.
I am not an attorney, however...
US courts have held that items covered under US Free Speech doctorine here, said here by US citizens, are not areas where they will enforce either foreign court actions nor extradition requests.
Were it to come to that, and that would be a ridiculously unlikely outcome anyways, someone residing here in the US is almost certainly perfectly safe if they avoid committing anything that meets the definitions of libel or slander here in the US. We have no equivalent to the criminal history privacy law at issue here; people's long ago criminal convictions are a matter of open public record. Factual discussion of them is not actionable or a tort.
It might conceivably interfere with future travel abroad, but the odds are so low as to be vanishingly negligible.
As far as I can tell, anything which one could write which would be outside clearly protected free speech in the US would not be suitable for Wikipedia anyways, and someone else would no doubt revert it out.