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